uc Berkeley news flash: "race" is just a social construct!

By A Longtime Reader

To: add1dda@aol.com <add1dda@aol.com>

Sent: saturday, january 24, 2026 at 03:46:20 p.m. est

uc Berkeley news flash: "race" is just social construct!

And they will program ai to conform to this dogma, proudly announces the university.

friday, jan. 23, 2026

ai has a bias problem. can we build something smarter? - Berkeley news

AI has a bias problem. Can we build something smarter? - Berkeley News Kara Manke UC Berkeley computer scientist Emma Pierson believes we can use AI to improve our healthcare and criminal justic...

ai has a bias problem. can we build something smarter?

UC Berkeley computer scientist Emma Pierson believes we can use AI to improve our healthcare and criminal justice systems — but only if we design these algorithms with an eye toward equality.

By Kara Manke

. . . Piernson is developing AI and machine learning methods for medicine and the social sciences, with the goal of improving health care and reducing social inequality. Recently, she developed a new test for detecting racial discrimination in policing. She is also working to reduce racial and gender bias in algorithms, particularly those that are used to assess disease risk and make critical decisions about patient care. 

"I am trying to use AI to make a healthier and fairer world," Pierson said. 

Pierson was recently named the Zhang Family Endowed Professor and is affiliated with the Berkeley AI Research Lab, Computational Precision Health and the Center for Human-Compatible AI.

Emma Pierson named Zhang Family Endowed Professor at UC Berkeley EECS Emma Pierson, who joined the UC Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) earli...

 . .  . . Soon after beginning a graduate program in computer science, also at Stanford, Pierson began working on police traffic stop data collected as part of the Stanford Open Policing Project. The data revealed undeniable racial disparities, galvanizing Pierson to focus her work not only on improving health care, but also on identifying and addressing racial inequalities.

"If you looked at the very basic statistics of the data — the racial disparities in how likely people were to be searched or arrested after a stop — the gaps were huge," Pierson said. "It was apparent that something catastrophic was going on." 

However, her work on police traffic stop data also highlighted the importance of designing precise statistical tools for understanding the how and why of inequalities. In a study published late last year, Pierson and her collaborator Nora Gera, a graduate student at Cornell University, devised a new way to test whether inequities are caused by discrimination rather than other factors.

. . . 

"Race is a socially constructed variable, not biological," Pierson said. "And historically, race has been included in medical decision-making and in algorithms in racist ways. By using race in these algorithms, we might worry about further entrenching health disparities." 

https://news.berkeley.edu/2026/01/20/ai-has-a-bias-problem-can-we-build-something-smarter/

Emphasis added.