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Artificial Intelligence Needs Diversity to Prevent Society’s Biases

Artificial Intelligence Needs Diversity to Prevent Society’s Biases

I am excited to share this video segment on Artificial Intelligence and Diversity that I worked on in partnership with Chivas Venture.   Please leave your comments, thoughts, and suggestions in the comments section below.

All of the “Bigs” are getting involved in AI, and by “Bigs” I mean Microsoft, Uber, Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM and others.  They’re creating AI Venture Funds and working on things like machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, facial recognition, and more. 

As of Third quarter of 2016 there was $12.2 Billion in funding in AI and with that amount of money pouring into AI, now is a great time to get into the AI game.

AI is still in the early stages, but that just means that there is a lot of opportunity to get involved and help shape the face of the future of AI.  Much like the Internet back in the mid-nineties, of which I was a part, AI could be a game changer in many different industries…good and bad.

Part of the “bad”, and I don’t want to go too Politically Correct on it, is that, 87% of those involved in AI are men and women only make up 13%.

Why is this a problem?

Since AI mirrors the values of its creators, we will have built-in biases in the original AI algorithms and if the data is biased from the start, it will take a long time to balance that bias.

Since we are just in the very early stages of AI development and implementation, we need to make sure that the bias is checked from the start. Long-held discrimination can live and even thrive on digital platforms, and if they go unchecked, they will perpetuate negative female stereotypes or racism, or sexism or all of society’s biases.

That is why we need diversity and that is why we need a woman’s touch in AI… from the start.

Women think, live, and work differently, and therefore they would code, build robots, approach machine learning from a different mindset and approach societal solutions from different perspectives. If we had more female developers working in the area of AI, you would see a better balance of values and broader solutions to societal problems.

So, inclusivity matters, we need to have women participating in shaping AI and shaping AI Policy.

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