In an open letter published today, researchers say studies have repeatedly shown that Amazon’s algorithms are flawed, with higher error rates for darker-skinned and female faces. The researchers say that if such technology is adopted by the police, it has the potential to amplify racial discrimination, create cases of mistaken identity, and encourage intrusive surveillance of marginalized groups.
“Flawed facial analysis technologies are reinforcing human biases,” Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, a PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of 26 signatories of the letter, tells The Verge over email. Scheuerman says that such technologies “can be appropriated for malicious intent … in ways that the companies supplying them aren’t aware of.”
Other signatories include Timnit Gebru, a Google researcher whose work has highlighted flaws in facial recognition algorithms; Yoshua Bengio, an AI researcher who was recently awarded the Turing Award; and Anima Anandkumar, a Caltech professor and former principal scientist at Amazon’s AWS subsidiary.
Read More.. Source The Verge