A.I. Fuels Inequality and Climate Change, a New Report Warns
The paper from AI Now also calls for a moratorium on facial recognition
The artificial intelligence industry is promoting worker mistreatment, discrimination, and pseudoscience, a new report claims. Meanwhile, tech companies continue to push facial recognition and ignore the potential carbon footprint of running energy-hungry A.I. systems.
The paper, known as the “AI Now 2019 Report,” is published by The AI Now Institute, an organization that researches the societal impacts of artificial intelligence. In its fourth year, the report makes 12 recommendations to the tech industry and policymakers.
“Across diverse domains and contexts, A.I. is widening inequality, placing information and control in the hands of those who already have power, and further disempowering those who don’t,” the report says.
Kate Crawford, co-founder of AI Now, says that the organization is particularly concerned with the field of affect recognition, a facet of the facial recognition technology that promises to determine someone’s personality or emotional state by their facial expression. The technology is being pitched as a tool to vet job applicants, track students’ attention in schools, and gather data on shoppers’ emotional states inside…
