Now is the time to start thinking about AI's impact on xenophobia

As the Trump administration continues to advance its hardline stance towards immigration, legal or otherwise, businesses are increasingly turning to automation and robotics to fill jobs previously held by humans. However, these thinking machines are not without drawbacks. AI development has long been beset by issues of intrinsic training bias, if not outright racist and xenophobic behavior. Take Microsoft's aborted social media bots Tay and Zo, for example, or Amazon's questionably-designed facial recognition system. However this relationship is not unidirectional -- AI can impact the expression of xenophobic ideas just as xenophobic practices can impact the rate of AI development.