Racial bias: Self-driving cars may be likelier to hit black people

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A new study finds a potential risk with self-driving cars: failure to detect dark-skinned pedestrians

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The findings speak to a bigger problem in the development of automated systems: algorithmic bias.

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In addition to worrying about how safe they are, how they’d handle tricky moral trade-offs on the road, and how they might make traffic worse, we also need to worry about how they could harm people of color.

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Kartik Hosanagar, the author of A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence, was not surprised when I told him the results of the self-driving car study, noting that “there have been so many stories” like this. Looking toward future solutions, he said, “I think an explicit test for bias is a more useful thing to do. To mandate that every team needs to have enough diversity is going to be hard because diversity can be many things: race, gender, nationality. But to say there are certain key things a company has to do — you have to test for race bias — I think that’s going to be more effective.”

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These fixes aren’t mutually exclusive. And arguably, it’s in companies’ best interest to do everything they can to root out racial bias, before people of color are forced to take the brunt of it, literally.

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By Sigal Samuel

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