TIME

Is technology capable of being racist?

When engineers make racially insensitive mistakes, it doesn’t always mean they are racists

WE ARE TOLD OF LATE THAT WE MUST entertain whether technology can be a racist. Like when Google Photos, in 2015, algorithmically identified black people as gorillas. Or earlier this year when Microsoft’s Twitterbot Tay, designed to emulate human conversation by trawling tweets, sucked up racist nonsense along with everything else and started spouting some of its own. Or when, in August, Snapchat offered a selfie-altering filter that rendered users as an

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from TIME

TIME4 min readInternational Relations
Fighting To Free Russia’s Political Prisoners
Vladimir Putin’s presidential victory this march was more of a coronation than an election. With the political system heavily skewed in his favor and all significant opponents disqualified, jailed, or dead, the vote was almost entirely pro forma. Sti
TIME3 min read
Stepping Up
Where do you find influence in 2024? You can start with the offices of the Anti-Corruption Foundation in Vilnius, Lithuania, where TIME met with Yulia Navalnaya earlier this spring. There, the activist is working with 60 supporters—whose anti-Kremlin
TIME1 min readCrime & Violence
A Gang Crisis In Haiti
A police officer guards the National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince on March 14, 12 days after gang members stormed the country’s two largest prisons, releasing more than 4,000 inmates. Gangs were implicated in the 2021 assassination of the last elec

Related Books & Audiobooks