AI is as stupid, racist, sexist and biased as its (mostly white male) creators. It lacks transparency, privacy, redress, consent, the understanding of consequences and it threatens freedom of speech

and it also gets basic facts wrong.

From Fatemi (2020) ‘There’s a gender diversity problem — many would call it a crisis — in AI. According to research by WIRED and Element AI, a mere 12% of leading machine learning researchers are female. This gap also exists in industry. According to recent research by the World Economic Forum and LinkedIn, only 22% of jobs in artificial intelligence are held by women, with even fewer holding senior roles. The gap appears even more stark at the “FANG” [Facebook (FB), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX), and Alphabet (GOOG)] companies — according to the AI Now Institute just 15% of AI research staff at Facebook and 10% at Google are women (Fatemi, 2020).’

Yes, some of the research was done by the WEF which displays the knots one can get in if one has to believe the opposite of what they say.

‘Facebook’s diversity report resulted in the following figures for 2019: The overall percentage of Black/African Americans in a role within Facebook was 3.8%, with 1.5% black people in technical roles within Facebook, and this is expected to be far lower for just AI-based roles (Facebook, 2021). Microsoft in 2020 report 4.5% of total workforce as being Black/African American, 2.7% in executive roles and 3.3% in technical roles (Microsoft, 2020). For 2020, Google report 3.7% of their employment roles, and only 2.4% of technical roles, were filled by Black people (Google, 2020).’

Algorithms are based on historical data; therefore sport loving, white men will always be the best ‘man’ for the job.

COMPAS imprisons Afro Americans more often than white ones with larger lists of offences.

Accusations of indebtedness, mostly affecting the lowest paid workers, by revenue collection in the OZ was generated through fundamental flaws in calculating annual salary. It reversed the burden of proof. There was no legal way to challenge the decisions as they were made inside a computer.

The FBI uses images from law abiding citizen’s driving licences for facial recognition.

For darker skins the error rate for assigning sex is up to 46%. The software is no better than random choice at telling if a person is male or female, yet it is being used by police in situations with high stake consequences.

AI impinges on freedom of speech as data from protest marches and social media is collected. A Palestinian saying ‘Good morning’ was arrested by Israelis as the software translated it as ‘attack them’.

Yet the march towards a future stacked against protest, freedom of speech, the most vulnerable and people of colour continues. AI maintains and enforces, without redress, class, racial and sexual historical bias and is not even fit for purpose.

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