It's built in ...

A very good friend of mine clued me in on this NYTimes piece titled We Teach A.I. Systems Everything, Including Our Biases, a notion made all the more disquieting as programmers no longer know how AI works due to the fact these systems learn in real time, thus generating code to handle the knowledge gained independent of the creators that created them.

Last fall, Google unveiled a breakthrough artificial intelligence technology called BERT that changed the way scientists build systems that learn how people write and talk.

But BERT, which is now being deployed in services like Google’s internet search engine, has a problem: It could be picking up on biases in the way a child mimics the bad behavior of his parents.

BERT is one of a number of A.I. systems that learn from lots and lots of digitized information, as varied as old books, Wikipedia entries and news articles. Decades and even centuries of biases — along with a few new ones — are probably baked into all that material.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

― George Orwell, 1984