Orly Lobel, a tech policy scholar and distinguished law professor at the University of San Diego, says she wrote The Equality Machine to balance out the horror stories of emerging digital technologies with some evidence that they can be steered toward amore equitable future.
While algorithms, artificial intelligence, and digital technology can do harm, she felt it was important to have a more nuanced conversation and consider what our future could look like if we designed technology to be an “equality machine,” to be AI for good, working to create a fairer and more just society.
In subsequent chapters, Lobel examines how digital technology can help correct employment discrimination and pay equity, prevent sexual harassment, improve healthcare, correct gender bias, and provide robotic assistance.
Throughout the book, she seeks to answer the question as to “whether we should be excited or alarmed by our newfound capabilities to know, detect, analyze, interpret, predict, and enhance… The unprecedented acceleration in digital capabilities and their integration into our lives mean that, inevitably, the key question is how technology can help address the challenges of power and inequality — challenges to our very humanity — that lie at the heart of our society.”