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The artificial intelligence industry is facing a “diversity crisis,” researchers from the AI Now Institute said in a report released today, raising key questions about the direction of the field.
Women and people of color are deeply underrepresented,
the report found, noting studies finding that about 80 percent of AI
professors are men, while just 15 percent of AI research staff at
Facebook and 10 percent at Google are women. People of color are also
sidelined, making up only a fraction of staff at major tech companies.
The result is a workforce frequently driven by white and male
perspectives, building tools that often affect other groups of people.
“This is not the diversity of people that are being affected by these
systems,” AI Now Institute co-director Meredith Whittaker says.
Worse, plans to improve the problem by fixing the
“pipeline” of potential job candidates has largely failed. “Despite many
decades of ‘pipeline studies’ that assess the flow of diverse job
candidates from school to industry, there has been no substantial
progress in diversity in the AI industry,” the researchers write...
Diversity, while a hurdle across the tech industry, presents specific
dangers in AI, where potentially biased technology, like facial
recognition, can disproportionately affect historically marginalized
groups. Tools like a program that scans faces to determine sexuality,
introduced in 2017, echo injustices of the past,
the researchers write. Rigorous testing is needed. But more than that,
the makers of AI tools have to be willing to not build the riskiest
projects. “We need to know that these systems are safe as well as fair,”
AI Now Institute co-director Kate Crawford says.
Source: The Verge
