>It's really only people where you can't tell what it does/is from the outside.
Thing is, that's not even true in that it doesn't fully acknowledge the problem. You often CAN tell information from people's outward appearance, albeit probabilistically. Therein lies the problem: you can very easily train an algorithm to be maximally right according to your cost function, but end up biased because the underlying distributions aren't the same between groups.
The issue is that as a society we've (mostly) decided that unfairly classifying someone based on correlated but non-causal characteristics is wrong, EVEN in the extreme that you're right more often than you're wrong if you make that assumption.
Thing is, that's not even true in that it doesn't fully acknowledge the problem. You often CAN tell information from people's outward appearance, albeit probabilistically. Therein lies the problem: you can very easily train an algorithm to be maximally right according to your cost function, but end up biased because the underlying distributions aren't the same between groups.
The issue is that as a society we've (mostly) decided that unfairly classifying someone based on correlated but non-causal characteristics is wrong, EVEN in the extreme that you're right more often than you're wrong if you make that assumption.