Europeans Can’t Talk about Racist AI systems. They Lack the Words.

Several European artificial intelligence projects rely on race without explicitly saying so. In February, El Confidencial revealed that Renfe, the Spanish railways operator, published a public tender for a system of cameras that could automatically analyze the behavior of passengers on train platforms. One characteristic that the system should be able to assess was "ethnic origin". Ethnic origin can mean many things. But in the context of an automated system that assigns a category to people based on their appearance captured by camera the term is misleading.