New research shows driverless car software is significantly more accurate with adults and light skinned people than children and dark-skinned people.
New research shows driverless car software is significantly more accurate with adults and light skinned people than children and dark-skinned people.
You don’t know that.
Speaking as someone who inherited a computer vision codebase from Asian devs and quickly found that it didn’t work on white skin…
Implementation decisions matter, and those decisions will always be biased towards demonstrating successful output for the people who plan, bankroll, and labor on the project.
How much of the 20% or 7.5% difference in detection is due purely to inevitable drawbacks of size and skin tone?
Who knows.
What we do know is that we did measure a difference, and we do live in a culture where we’re more likely to hear a CEO say:
“It works!” …and then see an article months later that adds “…except for children and black people.”
rather than:
“It doesn’t work!” …and then see an article months later that adds “…except for adults and white people.”
And that fact means we should seriously consider whether our attention (and intention) is being fairly applied here.