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Self-Driving Cars More Likely To Harm Black People

There is a serious problem affecting the AI world, the programmers are racist.According to Forbes, the way self-driving vehicles are being programmed is putting the lives of Black an brown folks in danger. BMW’s senior associate witnesses one of their self driving vehicles fail to protect two non-white pedestrians with his own eyes.

As Sam Huang, a Senior Associate at BMW i Ventures shared on Medium: “I was riding in the back of an autonomous driving car… Every time a pedestrian came into our vicinity, an alert would pop up on the tablet screen… There were two pedestrians that the car failed to detect… All the previous other pedestrians had been white. These two men the car had failed to detect were black.”

The issue has been called out by not just figures at BMW, but also by Apple’s head of AI who suggests “new training” to correct the issue.

“The real safety question, if you want to call it that, is that if we give these systems biased data, they will be biased,” said John Giannandrea, once Google’s and now Apple’s head of AI. “It’s important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems.”

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have been raising awareness within the AI industry to correct the problem with their own research. Will training actually fix anything? Or should we hire more Black programmers?

Are YOU shocked by any of this???

 

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