There are many in the world of AI who worry about its implications. One of those people is Navrina Singh, a former product manager for Qualcomm, then Microsoft, who saw firsthand at Microsoft how a Twitter bot it developed in 2016 as an experiment in “conversational understanding,” was, to quote The Verge, “taught to be a racist asshole in less than a day.”
Microsoft’s mishap is but one of a long string of examples of AI gone wrong. In 2019, an algorithm sold by the health services company Optum to predict which patients will benefit from extra medical care was found by researchers to badly misjudge the health needs of the sickest Black patients. Credit-scoring AI systems hav …
