Self-Driving Cars Are Racist

Or just badly designed. Maybe the designers are racist, or maybe the designers are just not up to the task. Study finds a potential risk with self-driving cars: failure to detect dark-skinned pedestrians - Vox

If you’re a person with dark skin, you may be more likely than your white friends to get hit by a self-driving car, according to a new study out of the Georgia Institute of Technology. That’s because automated vehicles may be better at detecting pedestrians with lighter skin tones.

The authors of the study started out with a simple question: How accurately do state-of-the-art object-detection models, like those used by self-driving cars, detect people from different demographic groups?

The difference in detection is 5%, which is not insignificant.

This has nothing on what will happen when the self-driving systems get hacked. And they will get hacked.