- cross-posted to:
- news@kbin.social
- cross-posted to:
- news@kbin.social
New research shows driverless car software is significantly more accurate with adults and light skinned people than children and dark-skinned people.
New research shows driverless car software is significantly more accurate with adults and light skinned people than children and dark-skinned people.
It’s both. The system is racist because of how it was trained and because its developers were not black, therefore “it worked for them” during development. And because black people are harder for cameras to see, especially in low light environments.
Even with clothes on, the dark skin, in a dark environment, “breaks” the “this is human” pattern that the ai expects to see, since the ai can see only the clothes. It is like camouflage. Can the ai “see” a pair of pants? Maybe, eventually but it still reduces the certainty, since the ai sees fewer “signs”.
Cameras should be using infrared to look for objects in the dark and not fucking hoping it looks slightly less dark than the surrounding pixels. It being “dark” is not an excuse. Cars drive at night and need to be engineered around that fact.
Edit: note this is about cameras. Ideally, you’d use radar which wouldn’t care but if you are just dual purposing cameras used for driving, this is the bare minimum.