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The Times Tech Podcast

Algorithmic Justice League’s Joy Buolamwini: “Pale male data”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9654 Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2020

⏱️ 42 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson bring on Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, to talk about pole vaulting (3:50), meandering from Ghana to Mississippi to Oxford (5:50), how her upbringing shaped her work (8:20), founding the Justice League (10:10), the lack of transparency in artificial intelligence (12:30), on how we’ve already lost our faces (14:20), the problems with data (15:40), Amazon’s failing system (21:10), why companies sell flawed product (26:10), the problem of standards (28:10), what she expects to happen with facial recognition (31:20), the regulatory backlash (33:35), why she chose the Justice League name (35:50), why she backs films and art (36:35) and being joined by others (38:50).

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Yo, technology.

0:02.0

What is it all about?

0:04.0

One in two adults, at least one and two, has their face in a face recognition network that can be searched unwarranted using algorithms that haven't been audited for accuracy.

0:16.0

That was 2016, right?

0:18.0

So more than 117 million adults in that context. And it comes back to this question

0:25.1

of how pervasive is it. We don't know. And we should.

0:34.6

Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech. I am your host, Danny Fortson. I am also the West Coast correspondent for the Sunday Times writing week in week out about all the wild things happening out here in Techland. And this week, I've got a good one for you. Now, you may recall

0:56.0

a few weeks back, we had on the program Rashida Richardson of AI Now. She came on to talk about

1:03.4

the many, many issues with facial recognition technology. And that, of course, was really

1:09.5

spurred by the protests over George Floyd's murder,

1:12.8

and you had several big companies come out, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, saying either we're

1:19.0

pulling out entirely or we're pausing, we're not going to sell this anymore until there are

1:22.9

regulations, which is great. But in that discussion, Richardson mentioned the groundbreaking research of one

1:30.3

person in particular who really was the first to kind of make clear just how problematic

1:35.8

facial recognition technology can be, especially when it comes to racial bias. And more broadly,

1:43.1

how these same dynamics can percolate through the

1:46.6

AI that is, you know, kind of seeping into all these different corners of our life.

1:50.9

And I thought, well, that sounds interesting.

1:54.0

We should have that person on.

1:55.8

So on the program this week, we have Joy Bulamwini.

2:01.3

She is the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, which is just a fabulous name, of course.

2:08.1

And what they do is they use research, art, policy, to really try to hold up a mirror to what is happening with these algorithms that are already out in the wild that are

...

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