AI Learns from Us. So It Learns Bias.

Got a mole on your arm? Soon, an app will soon be able to screen it for cancer. That salad you ate yesterday may have been screened by a LettuceBot, an AI mounted on tractors that checks whether individual plants need water. And if you live in In Singapore or Pittsburgh, you might already be cruising around in a self-driving cab. Amazing things are happening to the way we live, eat, and get around. Thanks to robots. But robots are programmed by humans. And those people carry implicit biases, as we all do. And those biases get encoded into the AI. Which can get really ugly, really fast.  Like when Google Photo tagged Jacky Alciné’s photos of him and his friend as gorillas a few years ago. This week, we look back at what he found, how the company responded, and the bigger problem behind this one landmark incident. Plus, an update on what Jacky's doing now.  Manoush and Jacky Alciné take a Note to Self(ie). (Manoush Zomorodi/Note to Self)