Artificial intelligence has a racial bias problem. Google is funding summer camps to try to change that

The late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and Tesla CEO Elon Musk have warned that human civilization is at risk from the unfettered development of AI, which could lead to autonomous weapons of terror. Such fears led staff at Google earlier this year to press the company to halt a drone contract with the Pentagon. The technology, still in its early stages, has also been decried for built-in racial bias that can amplify existing stereotypes. That's particularly worrisome as more companies use it for decisions such as hiring, and police leverage AI-powered software to identify suspects. MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini, who is Black, found facial recognition software could more easily identify her face when she wore a white mask, a result of algorithms that relied on data sets of mostly white faces.