The racism comes from saying "We recognise human faces" and then not recognising a significant proportion of humans.
It's not that hard to find both conscious and subconscious examples of systemic or individual racism. Engineers taking the easy path with webcam facial recognition is probably not a good one and serves only to give more fuel to those who claim people jump to the racism cry too quickly.
If the system had failed for with people with different hair color rather than skin color would they have been equally lazy?
It can be both. An attitude that considers facial recognition software acceptable if it only recognizes light-skinned people is both lazy and racist. Only choosing to test on light-skinned people is racist because doing so assumes dark skinned people are an exception or an outlier, rather than an equally valid part of the set of "human faces."
The assumption of ones own race being the default color for humans (rather than an arbitrary value) that leads to facial recognition software being trained on a data set so narrow that the resulting software can't even recognize skin colors that diverge from that norm is as much about implicit, albeit unintentional, racial bias as it is the particular technical problems involved and the need for engineers to cut costs and meet deadlines.
It's not entirely racist, but racism is a component.
I wasn't ready to admit the genius of the show before, but I am now: what you said is quite close to a line from the same episode (said by the sociopathic boss, Veronica) when told by the protagonist that the sensors were effectively racist "[...] it's actually the opposite of racist, because it's not targeting black people. It's just ignoring them. [company] insist the worst people can call it is "indifferent.""
Laziness and racism aren't mutually exclusive. Historically in America, white people haven't considered black people as fully human. You can read the various declarations of secession or the 3/5ths compromise for that. Or the long post-Reconstruction history of slightly more subtle ways.
Sure, laziness was involved here. But deciding a product was good enough to ship without caring that it worked for black people requires the effective belief that black people didn't really count as people. At least, not people that mattered. Imagine the reverse: if the product didn't work on white men, would it have been shipped? Of course not.
When laziness just happens to have a blatantly racist outcome in a place where there is a centuries-long history of racism, Occam's Razor suggests the explanation is racism. If laziness could not have caused the bad outcome to happen for white people, then it's pretty clear that pure laziness is not the real cause. It's instead white people being differentially lazy when it comes to black people. That's clearly racism.
As a confirmatory example, look at the American justice system. In a lot of places and times, the same nominal laws applied to white and black people. But they were enforced very differently. Serious crimes against black people were ignored. Minor infractions by black people were enforced vigorously. [1] Were the cops lazy? Sure, everybody's lazy sometimes. Was that why there was a racially different outcome? Definitely not.
[1] Examples of this are all over Loewen's "Sundown Towns" for example.
So plausibly, this really was an innocent and understandable mistake. Maybe they grew up in a town full of white people, and maybe all of their friends and coworkers are white. I understand what they did is technically racist, but that's because of that particular combination of people. Let's use _this_ 'experience' of "racist", but not it's exact definition. For example:
- It was racist you forgot your mother in law's birthday (who you see once a year.)
- It was racists you didn't lift the toilet seat. (Edit: I grew up in a culture where it was offensive to not raise the seat)
Definition: Any unintentional side effect from not thinking about someone* outside of everything you've experienced, and presumably causing harm to that outsider.
* Usually this person is disadvantaged in some way. But almost everyone is disadvantaged in some way, thus neutralizing this particular point IMO.
Does that sound rational? I don't think it does.
The world is full of suffering, and I'm advocating people help and love the people they are surrounded by. If many people did that, it would be easier to recognize each other, where ever you come from. Why? Because hate will push away everything it is unfamiliar with, but love will accept everything it is unfamiliar with.
(Now meta argument, do I expect people to change? No. So I try accepting them instead.)
> Maybe they grew up in a town full of white people, and maybe all of their friends and coworkers are white.
This is not an accident. All-white contexts in America are the result of personal and systemic racism. People who grow up in those contexts are, unsurprisingly, more likely to be personally biased and will regardless do things that further systemic racism.
People in that condition have a choice: they can either overcome their upbringing or they can continue to support white supremacy. If they do the latter, well, then they've made a choice. You can accept that if you want. I don't.
Less than 15% of the U.S. is African American so it's not at all surprising that there are areas where there are very few black folks as a result. That's nobody's fault and shouldn't be described as racist because, well, it isn't.
If you'd like to learn more, start with Loewen's "Sundown Towns", which describes how hundreds and possibly thousands of towns across the US were turned and kept white:
https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...
These were known as "sundown towns" because non-white people had to leave by sundown or face violence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town
These came about not because there were never any black people, but because white people indulged in violent ethnic cleansing. This happened most prominently during the Nadir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...
He proves this quite clearly through census data, where places that used to be racially mixed suddenly got white and then stayed that way for decades.
He doesn't give any specific Vermont examples, but Vermont had a prominent Klan presence in the 1920s: http://vermonthistory.org/research/research-resources-online...
Later, as suburbanization happened, white supremacy was maintained more subtly, through means such as racial covenants: https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/discrimination-in-deed/C...
It's also not necessary for a lot of white people to be actively racist to preserve white supremacy. As is clear from Loewen's book, all it takes is a small number of people willing to be active (e.g., making threats, burning crosses) to drive off new black arrivals. The majority can be passively accepting of a racist system without lifting a finger.
But that doesn't mean they won't end up biased. White people who don't know many black people are more likely to be biased, and all-white towns produce people that are more likely to have racist views. (For more, see Loewen's Ch 11, "The effects of sundown towns on whites".)
> But deciding a product was good enough to ship without caring that it worked for black people requires the effective belief that black people didn't really count as people.
Nobody ever said "oh it doesn't work with black people? Who cares LOL." I was going to make a crack about mental gymnastics but this isn't even that. You're just making shit up at this point.
> When laziness just happens to have a blatantly racist outcome in a place where there is a centuries-long history of racism, Occam's Razor suggests the explanation is racism.
No, even using your sentence here you admit the cause is laziness but then try to reframe it to racism because that fits your world view. Just like the fact that we're talking about webcams and you're talking about the 3/5th compromise and the American justice system.
Is there institutional/structural racism in the US? Absolutely. Webcams aren't a good example of it, sorry.
We don't know whether or not they knew it didn't work with black people before they shipped it. Maybe they did and dismissed it with technical hogwash, as you are here. Maybe they did and decided it was an ok flaw. Maybe they didn't know because the company doesn't have any black employees and nobody though to test it on black people because the people in charge don't know any. Or maybe they do and just don't care. There are many possible paths to this decision, but any of them demonstrates systemic racism.
And this is on topic, because the broader topic is social implications of technology.
As an aside, your attempt to narrowly define the topic so racism can't even be spoken of is a pretty typical move from people experiencing white fragility: http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249
Speaking of work, have you tried testing your definition of racism on non-white subjects and products, such as Black Entertainment Television? It doesn't hold up very well.
You could mean two things by "testing your definition of racism on non-white subjects": in the US or elsewhere. Either way, yes, of course I have. When going elsewhere it's necessary to speak of "the dominant racial group", and that can be helpful here too. So taking BET, we can ask questions like, "What effect are they having on non-dominant racial groups?" And, "Do their actions tend to increase or decrease the racial power imbalance?"
I'm not much of a TV person, so I'm not familiar with their shows. But I took a look: https://www.bet.com/shows.html
My first impression is that they are having positive effects on a non-dominant racial group, and are acting to decrease the racial power imbalance. Therefore, no, they are not racist.
Since you are anonymous person with a new account turning up to be a dick about the topic of racism, I presume your question was entirely insincere. But just in case, I hope you find the answer useful.
No, it's an insufficiently sensitive contrast filter combine with too narrow a training set. Screaming racism at everything that is even marginally approaching the topic of race detracts from real racism and ignores the actual issue here - shitty software.
There could be a hidden assumption on the part of the engineering team that light-skin is "normal" and anything else is a special case. Nobody is saying "I hate black people" or anything of the kind.
Or, as happened with a voice recognition system a former employer used, it was tested on the engineering staff, who happened to be all male. As a result it didn't work well for most women who tried to use it. There was no intentional exclusion of women from the test data, and I'd argue, no intentional exclusion of women from the engineering teams. But it is reasonable to say that systemic sexism that excludes women from engineering careers helped this system fail.
These kinds of problems are difficult to solve, because they aren't active decisions on anyone's part. They evolve out of pervasive conditions, and unconscious biases. At root, the source is still racism, or sexism (or another form of discrimination).
Personally, I think it could be understandable people didn't consider race when developing facial recognition technology, especially when we've only had mainstream awareness of this for under a decade and many people live in racially homogeneous or dominated cultures. However, I don't think it's acceptable for organizations, and the time when you can safely say you didn't understand biased learning data will be over soon. There are considerations you need to make scaling your tech from personal project to something the public will consume.
Also, the day will come when computers can point out racist stuff better than the average human can now, albeit with a high false positive rate. I say this because it's relatively easy; even if you only count a subset of tweets talking about racism as not trolling, that's still a shockingly high number of meaningful things about the world many people aren't seeing.
If it's not worth the trouble to see if your system works for non-whites, that's beyond lazy.
Like the soap dispensers that don't work for dark skinned people.