Review of Coded Bias — CI2311W
The documentary, Coded Bias, speaks about facial recognition and how its ethics play into society today. The film talks about how facial recognition has misinformation and bias towards people of color. This all started when Joy Buolamwini, an MIT Media Lab researcher, noticed that her facial recognition would not pick up her face normally, but when she wore a white mask it did. This lead Joy to found “The Algorithmic Justice League”, and to conduct even more research into the biases of facial recognition.
Something I have never heard about is the “social score” in China. The scoring system can be used for individual people, companies, and government organizations. The system will basically monitor you from facial recognition and other aspects of artificial intelligence and then score you, placing you into categories that may limit your freedom. This is very scary to think that this is being used today, and affects the lives of millions. The thought of knowing that there are surveillance cameras watching and scoring you can put a very uncomfortable feeling into your stomach.
What stood out most to me from the film was the overall amount of technological information that is taken in. I think that facial recognition is a great feature and is very convenient to have access to. I feel as if being able to use my face to unlock my phone versus typing in my password every single time saves me a lot of time in the long run. However, how can we make facial recognition less biased? What are some advancements that companies can do to make sure that these biases are lessened? I think that facial recognition has a lot to improve on, but can be something that is used by everyone in the future.