Artificial Intelligence. Robot Racism

Artificial Intelligence. Robot Racism

THERE IS SOMETHING RATHER democratic about the robot called Bender (from the TV show Futurama) and his desire to kill all humans. It means he doesn’t seem to care about race, nationality, gender or diet preference; he hates all humans just the same: they are whiny meat bags doomed to a selfinflicted apocalypse.

Bender’s equal opportunity approach seems far removed from today’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) – news stories keep popping up about AI failing to treat all humans equally, surprisingly along racial lines. These machines are sexist, racist and they make a lot of mistakes, so much so that it seems we have created autonomous technology that looks more like us than we might like. But how bad is it really?

The famous COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) programme was revealed by ProPublica in 2016 to be unfavourably biased against black offenders when it was used to measure the risk that a convict might re-offend. In the ProPublica article they use a few examples to illustrate how good the system is at punishing black offenders, and showing exceptional leniency toward white offenders.