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By Virginia Eubanks, from Automating Inequality, which was published this month by St. Martin’s Press. Eubanks is an associate professor of political science at the University at Albany, SUNY, and a founding member of the Our Data Bodies project.

Forty years ago, nearly all the major decisions that shape our lives—whether or not we are offered employment, a mortgage, insurance, credit, or a government service—were made by human beings. They often used actuarial processes that functioned more like computers than people, but human discretion still prevailed.

Today, we have ceded much of that decision-making power to machines.…

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January 2018

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