
Artificial Intelligence's White Guy Problem - yusee
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html
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yusee
> Another scandal emerged recently when it was revealed that Amazon’s same-day
> delivery service was unavailable for ZIP codes in predominantly black
> neighborhoods.

Without knowing the details behind this, it seems likely that Amazon and other
web companies could be been "discriminatory" for purely business reasons.
Predominantly black neighborhoods are likely to spend less totally and per
customer than average, especially in urban areas where blacks are on the
bottom of high inequality. Amazon provides greater service to wealthier
neighborhoods for the same reasons as brick and mortar businesses.

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caramelsuit
Hillarious that the writer cherry picked examples worse than any ML programmer
ever would by accident or malign disinterest. If the writer had been forced
(as they imply programmers should be) to include examples from South Korea
(lots of good ML work going on there) or China (Baidu etc) the article would
have fallen apart.

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arcanus
I'm reminded of msft's first generation kinect, which had much more trouble
identifying a players face if it was African American, versus caucasian.
Unintentionally racist, although I would hardly blame the algorithms.

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Gaessaki
That wasn't actually the case. There were issues with black clothing and low
lighting, but it works fine with dark skin tones.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-kinect-has-
trouble...](http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-kinect-has-trouble-
recognizing-dark-skinned-faces-2010-11)

