When you perform a Google search for every day queries, you don’t typically expect systemic racism to rear its ugly head. Yet, if you’re a woman searching for a hairstyle, that’s exactly what you might find.
A simple Google image search for ‘women’s professional hairstyles’ returns the following:
… you could probably pat Google on the back and say ‘job well done.’ That is, until you try searching for ‘unprofessional women’s hairstyles’ and find this:
It’s not new. In fact, Boing Boing spotted this back in April.
What’s concerning though, is just how much of our lives we’re on the verge of handing over to artificial intelligence. With today’s deep learning algorithms, the ‘training’ of this AI is often as much a product of our collective hive mind as it is programming.
Artificial intelligence, in fact, is using our collective thoughts to train the next generation of automation technologies. All the while, it’s picking up our biases and making them more visible than ever.
This is just the beginning … If you want the scary stuff, we’re expanding algorithmic policing that relies on many of the same principles used to train the previous examples. In the future, our neighborhoods will see an increase or decrease in police presence based on data that we already know is biased.
Source: The Next Web
