Illustration by Maarten Huizing
There is a central paradox at the heart of the AI: The same capabilities that let firms personalize at scale, automate service delivery, and generate operational insight are the ones that surveil, manipulate, and discriminate. In 2025, Apitor, a robot toy maker, was fined for harvesting children’s location data and sending it to a third party in China. Sirius XM Radio is facing a lawsuit over an AI hiring tool that allegedly screened out Black applicants using racially proxied variables such as zip code and alma mater before any human reviewed a resume. Australian regulators determined that two retailers owned by the conglomerate Wesfarmers deployed facial recognition on shoppers without adequate notice.
