Dr. Joy Buolamwini on Preserving the Humanity in AI

KQED's Forum

KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2023

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Many of us are familiar with the biases baked into modern technology, but these are heightened with AI, warns Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who has been called the “conscience of the A-I revolution.” A computer scientist and digital activist who holds a PhD from MIT, Dr. Buolamwini exposed how facial recognition technology failed to recognize darker skin color across a range of commonly used apps. We talk to Dr. Buolamwini about her new book “Unmasking AI,” which chronicles her efforts to bring humanity back to technology and her fight for “algorithmic justice.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Support for KQED podcasts comes from San Francisco International Airport.
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0:59.3	From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Grace Wan in Fermina Kim.
1:21.6	Coming up on forum, while working on a project as a graduate student at MIT, Dr. Joy Bull Lemweeney noticed that the facial
1:28.5	recognition technology she was using did not register her face.
1:32.5	Curious, she donned a white Halloween mask lying around her office and tried again.
1:37.0	Bingo.
1:38.0	The computer responded.
1:39.6	What Dr. Bull-Lamweeney discovered was not a glitch in the code, but a troubling bias that
1:43.8	had been baked into the
1:44.8	system. In her new book, Unmasking AI, Dr. Bulamweeney writes about how this discovery led her to a
1:51.3	career of digital activism. We talked to her after this news.
2:04.9	This is Forum. I'm Grace Wan in Fermina Kim.
2:13.0	Last month, President Biden issued a sweeping executive order aimed at trying to embed safety and security into artificial intelligence systems.
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