This article makes a perfectly valid point- AI is only as good as the data you use to train it. If you feed it bad, biased data, then the AI will behave in bad, biased ways.
These biases can be major (no Amazon delivery to black neighborhoods) or minor. I'm reminded of a gaming podcast I heard (can't remember which one) where a guy recounted watching a female journalist try VR goggles that couldn't detect her eyes because she had mascara. Apparently no one making the headset had tested the effects of that kind of makeup.
The article is right. If we are serious about creating products that revolutionize everyone's lives, we need to involve more kinds of people. Our perspectives are limited. We can't understand everything. That's the point of having a diverse team. Like Ben Thompson says, there's a very strong business case for diversity because "You don't know what you don't know."
The article begins by conflating algorithms and training data and that becomes the "sticking point" in the reader's mind even though she later clarifies this fact soon after. This is not a surprise since this obfuscation helps to back the sinister and prosecutorial tone of the piece.
While I agree that the article raises an important point, I don't really see how more diverse development teams would have fixed any of the problems raised.
This article makes a perfectly valid point- AI is only as good as the data you use to train it. If you feed it bad, biased data, then the AI will behave in bad, biased ways.
These biases can be major (no Amazon delivery to black neighborhoods) or minor. I'm reminded of a gaming podcast I heard (can't remember which one) where a guy recounted watching a female journalist try VR goggles that couldn't detect her eyes because she had mascara. Apparently no one making the headset had tested the effects of that kind of makeup.
The article is right. If we are serious about creating products that revolutionize everyone's lives, we need to involve more kinds of people. Our perspectives are limited. We can't understand everything. That's the point of having a diverse team. Like Ben Thompson says, there's a very strong business case for diversity because "You don't know what you don't know."