AI IS MOVING TOO FAST, AND THAT’S A GOOD THING
2019 was a great year for seeing what AI could do. Waymo deployed self-driving taxis to actual paying customers in Arizona. Bots from OpenAI and DeepMind beat the top professionals in two major esports games. A deep-learning algorithm performed as well as doctors—and sometimes better—at spotting lung cancer tumors in medical imaging.
But as for what AI do, 2019 was terrible. Amazon’s facial recognition software? Racist, according to MIT researchers, who reported that the tech giant’s algorithms misidentify nearly a third of dark-skinned women’s faces (while demonstrating near-perfect accuracy for light-skinned men’s). Emotion detection, used by companies such as WeSee and HireVue to perform threat assessments and screen job applicants? Hogwash, says the Association for Psychological Science. Even the wonky field of natural language processing took a hit,
