As a general rule of thumb, things have been getting increasingly digital. Bluetooth connections are attempting to rid the world of tangled wire messes. Cryptocurrency is attempting to replace physical money with virtual wallets. Cloud storage is attempting to replace physical data warehouses with consolidated web servers. But there is one thing in tech that aims to go the opposite way, Biometrics.
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Research has found that certain facial-recognition software perpetuates society’s existing inequities based on race, class, and gender. Joy Buolamwini, an M.I.T. Media Lab researcher, discovered that the facial-recognition algorithm she was working on could not detect her face – until she put on a white mask. She soon realized that many artificial-intelligence programs are trained to identify patterns using data sets that skew light-skinned and male results. Buolamwini stated, “When you think of A.I, it’s forward-looking, but A.I. is based on data, and data is a reflection of our history.”
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