My book on artificial intelligence, When Monkeys Learn from Monkeys, argues that, taken under the wing of a higher intelligence, we could increase our own intelligence. Just as Francine Patterson took the female gorilla Koko under her wing, taught her … Continue reading Since an AI Defeated the Go World Champion, Humans Also Play Better
Actors know that they will never become the audience’s favorite character if they are on stage or in front of the camera with children or animals. One becomes an extra. There is something about showing our sympathy to children and … Continue reading AI Swinishness
The fact that we are evaluated and judged for a wide variety of life situations is nothing new. School grades, credit score for loans and also the Safety Score for driving a Tesla are familiar and new examples of how … Continue reading The Problem With An AI-based Overdose Risk Score For Pain Medications.
About four years ago, researchers at Stanford University showed in a study that an artificial intelligence (AI) was better than humans at determining a person’s sexual orientation based on portrait photos. The AI was able to identify whether or not … Continue reading X-Rays Reveal Human Race to AI And Experts Don’t Know How
In a final scene of Ex Machina, in which an eccentric company founder has a programmer from his company perform the ultimate Turing test on Ava, his human-like artificial intelligence, the escaped Ava is seen walking one last time through … Continue reading Transrobotism – Transhumanism’s Twin
First it was an oil pipeline, then a large meat producer that was paralyzed by cyberattacks. Not a week goes by without a hospital here, a shipping company there or, most recently, Colonial Pipeline, through whose oil pipelines 45 percent … Continue reading The Coming of an AI Pearl Harbor is Inevitable
How do you prepare a sandwich spread with peanut butter and strawberry jam? Quite simply, you take two slices of bread, smear peanut butter and jam on it and you’re done? Not quite, if you follow these instructions exactly. That’s … Continue reading The peanut butter jelly sandwich instructions for an AI
When Mary Shelley wrote her novel ‘Frankenstein’ at the age of 20, she struck a chord with the times. The phenomenon of electricity, which caused dead frogs’ legs to twitch wildly, had stirred people’s imaginations. In retrospect, it seems little … Continue reading Machine Learning and Democracy
The United States has had an interesting approach to new technology and challenges since its founding: whenever they reach a certain critical mass, Americans create an agency or authority to deal with them exclusively, both in terms of regulation, impact … Continue reading The new U.S. AI Initiative compared to the European Digital Strategy.
Data bias caused by poorly curated data is increasingly emerging as an important issue in the development of artificial intelligence. To this end, it is important to know that today’s AI is fed millions and millions of data sets through machine learning. Where this data comes from, and who selects and compiles it, is critical. If such a data set, which is supposed to recognize faces, has predominantly faces with light skin color or more men than women, then such faces are recognized well, but the AI then makes more errors with women or dark-skinned people, or even in combination with the face recognition of dark-skinned women.
While this may not be so tragic in the case of facial recognition, in other systems it can be a matter of life and death, imprisonment or freedom, or the granting or denial of credit. Another pitfall is that human stereotypes are embedded and deepened in the system. One such case was discovered by Anna Kholina, a Russian living in Helsinki. She had Google Translate, an AI-based online translation software, translate some sentences from gender-neutral Finnish into English. The result reflected gender stereotypes. Sentences that the system associated with typically female activities were translated with the female case, and those with typically male activities were translated with the male case.
Such translations pose a problem when it comes to eradicating gender stereotypes. The fact that women are allowed to vote, study, and take up professions, and even roles that were only open to men until recently can now be exercised as a matter of course, is not self-evident and also has a lot to do with language and pointing out opportunities.
Continue reading “Gender Stereotyping in Google Translate”