Autonomous Cars Can't Recognise Pedestrians with Darker Skin Tones

The headline here is not a good description of the actual paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.11097.pdf).

The difference in average precision in bounding boxes between the LS (light skin) and DS (dark skin) observed by the researchers was around 1-10%. Not "can't recognize". Notably, people with dark skin were underrepresented in the dataset that the researchers used.

When they compensated for the dataset imbalance by reweighting examples, the issue was resolved.

Notably, the research itself is on publicly-available object detection systems, not any actual autonomous vehicles. Any company seriously building an AV 1) has their own diverse datasets collected from real-world driving and 2) has almost certainly already handled this issue (skin color is a blessedly minor source of variation in pedestrian detection, compared to the tremendous headaches caused by clothing, costumes, carrying other objects, all of which need to be accounted for...).

The paper is good a reminder of the importance of fine-tuning any pedestrian detection system to fix imbalances in your dataset, and avoid false negatives. But it's not what the title claims.

OK.

Can we suspend identity politics and admit that systemic homogeneity bias in software development is as much a technical as social and political problem?

I mean, why is it ok to release facial recognition software that has only been trained on white faces? Why is that considered a minimum viable product?

When we get to the point that facial-recognition systems don't recognize black people, autonomous cars won't even stop for them and law enforcement risk assessment AIs automatically tag them with a x2 modifier for criminality, this stuff stops looking like naive techie ignorance and starts looking like malice.

And, all else aside, it's bad design.

Lighting matters, and thus Daylight Saving Time matters. Could it be racist to make one choice or another for Daylight Saving Time?

Background matters. Should be use concrete roads or asphalt roads? Could that choice be racist?

Maybe we shouldn't go looking for racism everywhere and always assuming it exists.