AI Will Be Your New Best Friend
August 15, 2017
Technology is an important component of functioning in developed countries. Despite large segments of the people adopting technology, there is still a huge gap with certain demographic groups based on socioeconomic and age factors. Senior citizens cannot wrap their head around new technology, while other people cannot afford to buy expensive computers and mobile devices. Other people are just fearful of what technology can do. The Verge article, “Google Wants To Make Sure AI Advances Don’t Leave Anyone Behind” explains Google’s endeavors to reach all types of people despite their hesitancies.
Google launched the AI initiative PAIR (People and AI Research) that will study and redesign ways people from all levels of society interact with artificial intelligence.
It’s a broad remit, and an ambitious one. Google says PAIR will look at a number of different issues affecting everyone in the AI supply chain — from the researchers who code algorithms, to the professionals like doctors and farmers who are (or soon will be) using specialized AI tools. The tech giant says it wants to make AI user-friendly, and that means not only making the technology easy to understand (getting AI to explain itself is a known and challenging problem) but also ensuring that it treats its users equally.
One problem with AI is the type of data it is fed. There is a reason Microsoft’s chatbot modeled after a teenage girl became a cursing racist and anti-Semitic chatbot after one day: users fed it data of this nature. Google’s PAIR wants to fight prejudice data by using Facets Dive and Facets Overview-two new open-source tools that will allow programmers to see faults in their data. Facets Dive is being used for facial recognition software and it is sorting testers by country origin and comparing errors with successful identification.
Artificial intelligence is not intentionally biased, human data makes it so. Do not forget, people, that humans build machines and they reflect their creators.
Whitney Grace, August 15, 2017
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