
Self-driving cars may be more likely to hit you if you have dark skin - ozdave
https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/613064/self-driving-cars-are-coming-but-accidents-may-not-be-evenly-distributed
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uberman
The article is very thin on details. It serves mostly to point to an abstract
for a research paper :
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.11097](https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.11097)

The abstract is unfortunately also very light on detail.

It appears as though the researchers trained a number of classification
systems using static images of pedestrians noting skin color and observed that
darker skin tones resulted in mis-classification more often than for lighter
skin tones. The original article then sensationalizes this suggesting that
means self driving cars are more likely to kill darker skinned people.

I believe there are a number of problems here.

Fist, the skin tone bias in image training data sets is well documented. The
abstract it self says such bias motivated their research. The conclusion that
pedestrians with darker skin tones were mis-classified more often should not
really come as a surprise given that these training sets have historically
resulted in this type of mis-classification.

Second, pedestrian detection is not done (typically) using cameras but with
LIDAR. LIDAR has no notion of skin tone. Cameras are more traditionally used
for lane departure and blind spot checking. See : [https://www.quora.com/How-
do-self-driving-cars-see-in-the-da...](https://www.quora.com/How-do-self-
driving-cars-see-in-the-dark)

In my opinion there there is quite a large gap between noting the impact of
biases in training data applied to static images of pedestrians and a
sensationalized conclusion that "Self-driving cars may be more likely to hit
you if you have dark skin"

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towaway1138
To the degree that this is actually so, it's likely that human-driven cars
have the same problem. The main difference is that it will be reasonably easy
to permanently fix the issue with the former.

