Being progressive for the sake of "going forward" sounds like misguided idealism. What do we do when progressive computer models lead us down a harmful path, do we simply play the typical liberal blame game and point fingers everywhere else while digging our head into sand?
This isn't even remotely far-fetched. If you're a rural working class person, it's not at all hard to see how machine learning algorithms could adversely affect decisions about your insurance rates, loan acceptances, sentencing, the frequency with which your homes and businesses are inspected, and so on.
The idea that "discrimination" is somehow a progressive bugbear is --- well, I don't know how better to say this --- deeply stupid. Swirling eyes-within-eyes sticking out from blobs of fur inverted machine learning stupid.
What I'm trying to say is correcting discrimination under the guise that it's unfair to certain sections of society is chasing your own tail out of boredom -- what's the point? To improve society, or improve usefulness of machine learning-derived data to make radical (but necessary) decisions? Do we maintain our objectivity and move away from "improving society" when it's found to be counter-productive, or do we keep going forward with improving society and hope things get better?
Trying to "break out of the status quo" to produce more a accurate representation of the world sounds great, I'm totally all for removing human biases, but my concern is that it'll be handled badly to mistakenly attempt to benefit certain classes of society (eg: repeat of subprime mortgage crises from 07-09 but much more difficult to diagnose).
Think of it in terms of survival bias. ML models that discriminate against the well-educated urban workers that design and deploy them are not going to make it to production if they obviously discriminate against their own designers. Those developers and "data scientists" are not going to notice if those same models happen to deny college admission to kids who took a year off after graduating to work at a factory to help pay for their siblings room and board.