What Are Algorithms and Are They Biased Against Me?

Every minute, machines are shaping somebody’s future, as software decides which hospital patients should get extra monitoring or which credit card applicants get a thumbs-down. The hope was that programs combining objective criteria and mountains of data could be more efficient than humans while sidestepping their subjectivity and bias. It hasn’t worked out that way. Instead, the hospital program was found to underestimate the needs of Black patients, and the credit card software is being invest