So nah, it's not funny.
As I've explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12759089, different races have different sets of facial features which are used for facial recognition (because they vary more). Now, when programming the NN, what if you only told it to look for the set of facial features you thought was important? It's very easy to let unconscious biases seep into your code.
I thought that «race» is a social construct not a scientific one and thus can't be relied on as a deciding factor in a scientific experiment or endeavor like face detection.
Traffic laws are also social constructs. Yet we can build machines to follow them.
No. Some cultures on Earth define "race" with various, conflicting standards. Some don't even have that concept.
The Roman empire spanned swathes of North Africa and had major centres there and traded with subsaharan Africa. And traded with the 'orient' all the way to China.
Their writings don't make racial classifications. They don't even remark much on skin colour or other features.
Visual features were known, but not considered that significant. And later in the empire people from all over the world became Romans via citizenship and what we now call "race" never factored into it.
"The cross-race effect (sometimes called cross-race bias, other-race bias or own-race bias) refers to the tendency to more easily recognize members of one's own race."
This premise is not well grounded in facts as evidence can show that some people esp. racially unaware, uneducated or desensitized don't fall into this category. To support their claim, they cite a US-only study which can't be sufficient to extrapolate for all humanity as a universal fact since we all know that US society is divided along racial line and it's deeply ingrained into people's minds from childhood.
It's like their caste system and with a highly cultural not scientific element to it.
Color me skeptic about this theory.
Exactly.