Tay was designed to engage with people ages 18 to 24, and it burst onto social media with an upbeat “hellllooooo world!!” (the “o” in “world” was a planet earth emoji). But within 12 hours, Tay morphed into a foul-mouthed racist Holocaust denier that said feminists “should all die and burn in hell.” Tay, which was quickly removed from Twitter, was programmed to learn from the behaviors of other Twitter users, and in that regard, the bot was a success. Tay’s embrace of humanity’s worst attributes is an example of algorithmic bias—when seemingly innocuous programming takes on the prejudices either of its creators or the data it is fed.
Source: Wired
On Sunday night, 96 companies including some of the biggest names in tech, filed an amicus brief opposing Trump’s executive action on immigration. The legal document was created a week after leading tech executives simultaneously issued individual statements on the refugee ban.
Source: dailydot.com
Tech sector bosses decry Trump immigration order on Muslim countries:
President Donald Trump’s order Friday banning immigrants and visitors from seven Muslim nations is being met by both harsh and somber verbal resistance from top tech sector leaders—from Apple to Y Combinator. The move was racist, affected perhaps thousands of tech workers, and was un-American, the executives said in tweets, e-mails, Facebook posts, blog posts, and in LinkedIn entries.
Source: Ars Technica
The Alarming Downsides to Tech Industry Diversity Reports:
The tech industry doesn’t just have a diversity problem. It has a results problem. Major tech companies pour millions of dollars into recruiting, but there remain significant, quantifiable discrepancies—in workforce diversity, in gender equity among people of color, and in representation among top leadership. Even the industry’s annual diversity reports, a crucial step towards transparency, can hide vital information and nuance.
Tech companies have been disclosing their diversity numbers semi-annually since 2014. In November, Microsoft announced that it would tie executive bonuses to diversity goals after the number of women at the company decreased from 26.8 percent to 25.8 percent. Last year, Google donated $150 million to diversity efforts, and Apple similarly pledged $50 million. But after talking a big game about improving gender and ethnic diversity in their ranks, demonstrated progress has been very slow and, at times, misleading.
Source: Gizmodo
It turns out that while racism works the same way in the on-demand economy as it does everywhere else, accountability does not. As part of their user agreements, renters, drivers, and riders alike waive their right to public jury trials or to file class action suits against Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft.
On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled against Gregory Selden, a black man attempting to launch a class action suit against Airbnb for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When Selden’s reservation request was rejected by a white host, he rebooked using fake profiles with the names “Todd” and “Jessie.” Both were accepted instantly.
But, following the ruling, he’ll have to plead his case in private arbitration, where relevant documents are sealed and the outcome won’t help other users facing the same problem. Despite a number of black Airbnb users alleging racism on the platform, many of whom have used the #AirbnbWhileBlack hashtag to share their stories, they’re prevented from merging together to form a broader class action suit because of the same clause.
Source: fusion.net
Happy Ada Lovelace day - here's why we should all remember her
Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Who’s that? Just the first computer programmer. Ever. Lovelace’s friend Charles Babbage designed a concept for a machine he called the “Analytical Engine” – essentially a mechanical computer that would have relied on punch cards to run programs. He recruited Lovelace to translate some notes from one of his lectures, but while Lovelace was translating she added to the notes herself.
The notes grew to three times their original length, as Lovelace described what many call the first computer program. Because of funding issues, the machine was not built during her and Babbage’s lifetimes.
But Lovelace’s published article on the Analytical Engine later became a source of inspiration for Alan Turing’s work to build the first modern computers in the 1940s.