![]() If face-recognition technology has trouble depicting darker skin tones and women, innocent citizens can be wrongfully investigated by police.Īs AI programs restrict access to jobs, rental homes and home loans, there is little opportunity for legal recourse. If you’re a woman of colour from Glasgow, she writes, “you’re well and truly ‘focked’”. If audio technology can’t understand your voice, you could be rejected in a job interview, blocked from emigrating to another country or misunderstood in a desperate call to emergency services. Since then, the tech industry has been driven by an increasingly narrow band of society, so skewing the data, says Spicer, and deepening existing biases that are then replicated and repeated in an endless feedback loop. It was called LOL memory, an acronym for “little old ladies”.īritish scientist Tim Berners-Lee is credited with “inventing” the world wide web in the early 1990s, but 20 years earlier, Pam Hardt-English developed a computerised bulletin board linking libraries and a bookstore in San Francisco. To send Apollo 11 to the moon, Nasa hired highly skilled female weavers to hand-weave the ferrite rings that formed the memory system. In her book, Spicer identifies the many women involved in the development of new computer technologies: mathematician Ada Lovelace, associate of Charles Babbage and daughter of Lord Byron, who is considered to have devised the first computer algorithm actor Hedy Lamarr, whose work paved the way for GPS and Bluetooth technology Hilda Carpenter, who wove the first core memory plane for a computer in 1953 computer programmer Radia Perlman who, in the mid-1980s, solved the problem of file sharing between computers. Increasingly, she writes, “Our future is looking man-made, instead of human-made.” Women make up less than a quarter of Silicon Valley’s workforce. You can hear Spicer yelling as she thumps the keyboard: “A bun!”Īccording to Spicer’s research, about 90% of coding and engineering in AI is done by men. ![]() The only available emoji of a “woman of a certain age” depicts a grandmother-like figure with round specs and a bun. These tend to be young, middle-class, white and Asian men. Inevitably, these biases also reflect the homogenous pool of programmers and developers who design these algorithms. This data is being fed into diagnostic algorithms that will be used in hospitals in the future. A predictive cancer model in use, for example, uses mammograms from a dataset that’s over 80% white. In some cases, health data is collected from private hospitals in overwhelmingly wealthy white areas. So began Spicer’s seven-year investigation into the gender, racial, age-based and sexual biases shaping the development and use of artificial intelligence.Īs she says from her home in Sydney, “It is like when you see something and the scales fall from your eyes and you can’t stop seeing it everywhere around you.” It was 7.45am and her son had just seen South Park’s “toon hoon” Cartman bully and harass home robot, Amazon Alexa. In 2016, her then-11-year-old son announced he wanted a robot slave. “Falling into those stereotypes is a huge problem.”Īustralian journalist Tracey Spicer, NSW Premier’s 2019 Woman of the Year for her work in the #MeToo movement and a recipient of an Order of Australia gong, was blindsided by that problem, too. ![]() “I wanted to consider why we have – not necessarily a lack of imagination, but a narrow band of imagination when it comes to what we are making AI look like and sound like and do,” says Perkins. ![]() Premiered by the Auckland Theatre Company last year, The Made is funny, warm-hearted and chaotic, but it also casts a hard light on the stereotypes that shape the artificial intelligence industry. ![]() As Perkins says, “She has a lot of fury.”īut Arie’s sexbot programming limits her emotional capacity to an unflagging happiness. When Alice tries to infuse her robots with emotion, Nanny Ann gains the full gamut of emotional autonomy. She has Nanny Ann, a frumpy, middle-aged humanoid bot charged with childcare and housework.Īnd she has Arie, a new robot built on the chassis of a former sexbot. In Emily Perkins’ play The Made, Alice, a 40-year-old AI engineer and sole parent, negotiates the uncharted waters of robot emotions. ![]()
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