The risks of algorithmic discrimination and bias have received much attention and scrutiny, and rightly so. Yet there is another more insidious side-effect of our increasingly AI-powered society â the systematic inequality created by the changing nature of work itself. We fear a future where robots take our jobs, but what happens when a significant portion of the workforce ends up in algorithmically managed jobs with little future and few possibilities for advancement?...
Finance can be a force for good in society but, over the past few decades, structural and behavioral changes have pushed the industry away from its mission of serving clients and supporting the economy in favor of enriching itself. At worst, financial services firms are mired in conflicts of interests, cloaked in opacity and complexity, and skewed by information asymmetry. Many of my students are keen to work in finance but concerned about being corrupted as soon as they walk into their first jobs. What can be done to restore confidence in the industry?...
Humans have many kinds of biases. To name just a few, we suffer from confirmation bias, which means that we tend to focus on information that confirms our preconceptions about a topic; from anchoring bias, where we make decisions mostly relying on the first piece of information we receive on that subject; and from gender bias, where we tend to associate women with certain traits, activities, or professions, and men with others. When we make decisions, these types of biases often creep in unconsciously, resulting in decisions that are ultimately unfair and unobjective....
The authority that administers A-Level college entrance exams in the UK, Ofqual, recently found itself mired in scandal. Unable to hold live exams because of Covid-19, it designed and employed an algorithm that based scores partly on the historical performance of the schools students attended. The outcry was immediate, as students who were already disadvantaged found themselves further penalized by artificially deflated scores, their efforts disregarded and their futures thrown into disarray....
