
According to Bryson, biases occur because of the way that AI is developed. “People really expect that AI should be better than humans, that it should be perfectly neutral. That’s partly because they have no idea what intelligence is and where it comes from. It’s computation, not maths,” she says. “The reason that AI is going so fast right now is we’ve gotten really good at taking all the computation we’ve done before and putting it in machines. Unfortunately, what we’ve already learned includes all kinds of societal biases. The biases are things that if you just look at the world, you’re going to see.”
So far, so interesting. But there’s a big problem here, because while people prefer a female’s voice over a man’s, according to our survey a plurality of people (45 percent) also prefer their AI to be obedient (the figure rises to 51 percent for North America).