Oh yeah definitely. There is a very good book about this actually, Weapons of Math Destruction, where the author Cathy O'Neil talks about exactly this - how biases are laundered through algorithms.
Simply put:
- Police Enforcment unfairly policed black neighborhoods, overrepresenting them in historical records
- Machine learning models were run on said historical records
- Police Enforcement used said models to justify their policing, saying it was algorithmically determined.
I may be blanking on a few details, so if anybody can add anything please do, it has been a while since I've read it. These laundering algorithms will cause untold damage and should've been banned immediately.
