[bumby]

>If you're having a machine look at a dataset, and the machine determines that race or ethnicity is a material factor in determining some attribute in that dataset...

I think the trickiness is in providing the machine unbiased data to begin with so that it doesn't incorrect associations between features like race. The most egregious examples I'm aware of are the machine learning systems used to suggest criminal sentencing, but, apropos to this topic I believe there are cases where it may produce erroneous associations in something like skin cancer risk.