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Google Executive Warns of Face ID Bias (bbc.com)

Facial recognition technology does not yet have "the diversity it needs" and has "inherent biases," a top Google executive has warned. From a report: The remarks, from the firm's director of cloud computing, Diane Greene, came after rival Amazon's software wrongly identified 28 members of Congress, disproportionately people of colour, as police suspects. Google, which has not opened its facial recognition technology to public use, was working on gathering vast sums of data to improve reliability, Ms Greene said. However, she refused to discuss the company's controversial work with the military. "Bad things happen when I talk about Maven," Ms Greene said, referring to a soon-to-be abandoned project with the US military to develop artificial intelligence technology for drones. After considerable employee pressure, including resignations, Google said it would not renew its contract with the Pentagon after it lapses some time in 2019. The firm has not commented on the deal since, only to release a set of "AI principles" that stated it would not use artificial intelligence or machine learning to create weapons.

2 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wrong? by harvey+the+nerd · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's really broken. It missed at least 500 more...

  2. Easy solution by Solandri · · Score: 3, Funny

    The problem is the amount of light the camera sensors receive. Darker faces reflect less light, and thus the camera sensor gets less data to work with making algorithms based on that data less accurate at identifying darker faces.

    This presents an obvious solution. To further the goal of eliminating racial bias, we need to turn off all the lights. That means all light bulbs need to be banned, and existing ones destroyed. NASA should launch a huge unfurling disk to block out the sun and leave the planet in perpetual darkness. Newborns should have their eyes surgically removed upon birth (they won't suffer because they won't know what they're missing). Only then can we be free of the evil racial bias being promulgated by light.