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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Rethinking Algorithmic Bias Through Phenomenology And Pragmatism, Johnathan C. Flowers
Rethinking Algorithmic Bias Through Phenomenology And Pragmatism, Johnathan C. Flowers
Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings
In 2017, Amazon discontinued an attempt at developing a hiring algorithm which would enable the company to streamline its hiring processes due to apparent gender discrimination. Specifically, the algorithm, trained on over a decade’s worth of resumes submitted to Amazon, learned to penalize applications that contained references to women, that indicated graduation from all women’s colleges, or otherwise indicated that an applicant was not male. Amazon’s algorithm took up the history of Amazon’s applicant pool and integrated it into its present “problematic situation,” for the purposes of future action. Consequently, Amazon declared the project a failure: even after attempting to …