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No Robot Like Robot (2018)
A.I. researcher Janelle Shane responds to Annalee Newitz’s short story “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis.”
There are DARPA crisis teams working to build tools that can scrape together basic translation from what’s available on social media, but these aren’t expected to be nuanced, just enough to provide emergency assistance, not to the level of using endearing puns. In this fairy tale, Robot works for the CDC, but Robot-level technology would be a real game-changer for humanitarian crisis responders, the crew of the International Space Station, food delivery startups, and more. Having a well-meaning mind behind our algorithms would save us from a lot of the harm that we’re unwittingly inflicting—algorithms that copy our biases, that recommend extreme videos and articles, or that censor non-white, non-binary, non-heterosexual, and/or disabled voices.
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