Self-driving cars may be more likely to hit you if you have dark skin

The article is very thin on details. It serves mostly to point to an abstract for a research paper : https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.11097

The abstract is unfortunately also very light on detail.

It appears as though the researchers trained a number of classification systems using static images of pedestrians noting skin color and observed that darker skin tones resulted in mis-classification more often than for lighter skin tones. The original article then sensationalizes this suggesting that means self driving cars are more likely to kill darker skinned people.

I believe there are a number of problems here.

Fist, the skin tone bias in image training data sets is well documented. The abstract it self says such bias motivated their research. The conclusion that pedestrians with darker skin tones were mis-classified more often should not really come as a surprise given that these training sets have historically resulted in this type of mis-classification.

Second, pedestrian detection is not done (typically) using cameras but with LIDAR. LIDAR has no notion of skin tone. Cameras are more traditionally used for lane departure and blind spot checking. See : https://www.quora.com/How-do-self-driving-cars-see-in-the-da...

In my opinion there there is quite a large gap between noting the impact of biases in training data applied to static images of pedestrians and a sensationalized conclusion that "Self-driving cars may be more likely to hit you if you have dark skin"

To the degree that this is actually so, it's likely that human-driven cars have the same problem. The main difference is that it will be reasonably easy to permanently fix the issue with the former.