Comment by kelseyfrog
12 days ago
> Are soap dispensers that don’t give soap to people with darker skin racially biased? Kind of.
I'm struggling to extract the nuance that I feel is embedded here. Is it an ontological issue, a quantitative, or a qualitative dimension that puts it in the realm of kind-of?
Vision based tech developed in silicon valley notoriously doesn't often include a diverse training sample. There are have been more than a few cases were technology has only been tested on light skinned people and released to the world and didn't work for anyone with more pigment in their skin.
Soap dispensers that detect hands are one example, highlighted by GP, I believe Microsoft's Kinect also had issues on release detecting non-white people.
Yeah, why "kind of" and not "absolutely"?
The black box systematically changes the output based on the presence of an input signal of skin tone, which is strongly correlated with race.
Same with photographic negative film, where engineers made a trade-off with the chemicals that made contrast much better for lighter-skinned faces, which made darker-skinned faces much worse. In group portraits, darker-skinned people would appear as just teeth and eyes. Although in true American style, it was chocolate and furniture companies (and their advertisers) who pushed Kodak to develop better technology for capturing dark brown colors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-b...
I think it's "kind of" because part of the problem is intrinsic; if you're trying to detect reflections, and you're not even reliable with light skin 100% of the time, it says that there's some inherent difficulty here.
You realize it's biased when you think about it and realize the product could never have successfully shipped if it offered white people the poor reliability that it has for darker skin.