AI Fairness and Bias: The Measurement Gap

English: Regulators requiring AI fairness and bias assessment share three convergent goals: preventing discriminatory outcomes, protecting fundamental rights, and creating accountability for automated decisions. The problem is not the goals — it is the gap between what regulators want to achieve and what they have told organizations to measure. "Bias" conflates at least five distinct concepts. "Fairness" has over twenty formal definitions, several of which are mathematically incompatible. And no jurisdiction has specified which statistical test or metric constitutes compliance. The choice of what to measure is itself a governance decision — and most organizations have not made it deliberately.