Google's AI chief says forget Elon Musk's killer robots, and worry about bias in AI systems instead

Google's AI chief isn't fretting about super-intelligent killer robots. Instead, John Giannandrea is concerned about the danger that may be lurking inside the machine-learning algorithms used to make millions of decisions every minute. "The real safety question, if you want to call it that, is that if we give these systems biased data, they will be biased," Giannandrea said before a recent Google conference on the relationship between humans and AI systems. The problem of bias in machine learning is likely to become more significant as the technology spreads to critical areas like medicine and law, and as more people without a deep technical understanding are tasked with deploying it. Some experts warn that algorithmic bias is already pervasive in many industries, and that almost no one is making an effort to identify or correct it (see "Biased Algorithms Are Everywhere, and No One Seems to Care").