
How white engineers built racist code – and why it's dangerous for black people - kafkaesq
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/04/racist-facial-recognition-white-coders-black-people-police
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ImSkeptical
>facial recognition software has problems recognizing black faces because its
algorithms are usually written by white engineers

That quote doesn't seem right to me.

I think the basic premise - that facial recognition typically doesn't work as
well with black people, apparently backed up with research from the FBI, is a
critical thing to know and work on. I don't think the explanation is that
software engineers responsible are disproportionately white or racist, but
rather that the networks need to be trained with datasets including more
people of different races. For example, neural networks can recognize species
of birds, and that advance was not delayed by a dearth of avian engineers.

