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Self-Driving Cars May Hit People With Darker Skin More Often, Study Finds (futurism.com)
According to a new paper from the Georgia Institute of Technology, autonomous cars could disproportionately endanger pedestrians with darker skin, a troubling sign of how AI can inadvertently reproduce prejudices from the wider world. Futurism reports: [In the paper, the researchers] detail their investigation of eight AI models used in state-of-the-art object detection systems. These are the systems that allow autonomous vehicles to recognize road signs, pedestrians, and other objects. They tested these models using images of pedestrians divided into two categories based on their score on the Fitzpatrick scale, which is commonly used to classify human skin color. According to the researchers' paper, the models exhibited "uniformly poorer performance" when confronted with pedestrians with the three darkest shades on the scale. On average, the models' accuracy decreased by 5 percent when examining the group containing images of pedestrians with darker skin tones, even when the researchers accounted for variables such as whether the photo was taken during the day or at night. Thankfully, the researchers were able to figure out what was needed to avoid a future of biased self-driving cars: start including more images of dark-skinned pedestrians in the data sets the systems train on and place more weight on accurately detecting those images.
This is not true at all, it's based on false assumptions.
First of all, most self driving cars will end up using LIDAR. Skin color, not an issue.
Secondly. even cars with cameras do a lot of image transformations such that color is usually disposed of. You kin color is irrelevant to a recognizer looking for human forms.
In fact you could argue that during the day, darker skin is an advantage because against a blue sky it's more noticeable than really pale skin which could look like clouds... #GingerLivesMatter.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
....because physics is racis.
-Styopa
Apparently I hate black people because I almost ran one down last night. He was wearing black, standing on the highway, and was waving his hands around. The only thing you could see of him before the headlights hit him was the tiny cell phone light in his hand.
Guy ran out of gas and was too poor to pay for a tow truck. Yeah I drove him to a gas station and wasn't murdered, nor did I kill him. But the internet says I hate black people since I've never almost ran over a white guy. Anyone one to volunteer so I can clear my reputation?