Racism and Artificial Intelligence Become a Hot Topic
March 8, 2018
Here’s a scary thought: What if AI and machine learning inadvertently (or purposely) discriminate? Impossible, you say. How can an algorithm see race? Some of the brightest minds in the business have some shocking insight into this idea and it isn’t pretty, as we learned in a recent NextWeb story, “The future of FinTech is racist, according to this anonymous data scientist.”
According to the story:
Anybody that says, “We’re an AI company that’s making smarter loans”: racist. Absolutely, 100%.
I was actually floored, during the last Super Bowl I saw this SoFi ad that said, “We discriminate.” I was just sitting there watching this game like I cannot believe it — it’s either they don’t know, which is terrifying, or they know and they don’t give a shit, which is also terrifying.
I don’t know how that court case is going to work out, but I can tell you in the next ten years, there’s going to be a court case about it. And I would not be surprised if SoFi lost for discrimination. And in general, I think it’s going to be an increasingly important question about the way that we handle protected classes generally, and maybe race specifically, in data science models of this type.
It doesn’t end there. One future looking scientist had similar things to say, stating that if AI recognizes racism as a pattern, it might not have the intelligence not to proliferate it in many aspects of life. Haunting. Ideally, this will be the point in history where ethicists step in and help guide this crucial moment in our world.
Patrick Roland, March 8, 2018
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