Companies in numerous industries are facing lawsuits seeking to establish their liability for discrimination involving artificial intelligence.
One example pending in federal court is Mobley v. Workday, in which a Black job applicant alleges the company’s AI-powered hiring tools discriminated against him and other applicants based on race, age, and disability.
The U.S. Department of Justice, along with California and other states, is suing RealPage, alleging that its algorithmic pricing software enabled landlords to collude and inflate rents.
“The same things that happen when people are in charge are gonna happen when algorithms are in charge of filtering information. But if there aren’t enough parameters and constraints, then we’re gonna be rolling back the time back to when we didn’t have the kind of civil rights protections we have now,” Dharap said.
Without more details from Waymo or Alphabet, it’s unclear how they are verifying customers’ identities.
“In fairness, I don’t know what Waymo is doing to verify identity,” wrote Hany Farid of UC Berkeley’s School of Information. “But if it is only doing a simplistic name matching, this is inexcusable because we now have fairly good technology to verify identity that is light years ahead of a simplistic (and lazy) name matching.”
