Stuart Russell has a rule. "I won't do an interview until you agree not to put a Terminator on it," says the renowned British computer scientist, sitting in a spare room at his home in Berkeley, California. "The media is very fond of putting a Terminator on anything to do with artificial intelligence." The request is a tad ironic. Russell, after all, was the man behind Slaughterbots, a dystopian short film he released in 2017 with the Future of Life Institute.

The conversation about unconscious bias in artificial intelligence often focuses on algorithms that unintentionally cause disproportionate harm to entire swaths of society--those that wrongly predict black defendants will commit future crimes, for example, or facial-recognition technologies developed mainly by using photos of white men that do a poor job of identifying women and people with darker skin. But the problem could run much deeper than that. Society should be on guard for another twist: the possibility that nefarious actors could seek to attack artificial intelligence systems by deliberately introducing bias into them. According to a U.S. government study on big data and privacy, biased algorithms could make it easier to mask discriminatory lending, hiring or other unsavory business practices. Academics and industry observers have called for legislative oversight that addresses technological bias.