Error 404: the barriers to digital inclusivity
“The COVID-19 pandemic has seen the rapid expansion of e-commerce, online education, digital health and remote work. While these changes can provide huge benefits to communities, they also risk exacerbating and creating inequalities.
The widening digital gap is in danger of further weakening societal cohesion. Decisions historically made by humans, such as diagnosing health problems, choosing investments and assessing educational achievement, are increasingly made by sophisticated algorithms that apply machine learning to large data sets.
In the private sector, for example, more businesses worldwide are turning to algorithmic management to track employee productivity. Automating these decisions deepens biases when they depend on algorithms developed using skewed historical data sets.
The risks of automating bias are exacerbated by the volume of
