Physicists are increasingly developing artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to advance our understanding of the physical world but there is a rising concern about the bias in such systems and their wider impact on society at large. In 2011, during her undergraduate degree at Georgia Institute of Technology, Ghanaian-US computer scientist Joy Buolamwini discovered that getting a robot to play a simple game of peek-a-boo with her was impossible – the machine was incapable of seeing her dark-skinned face. Later, in 2015, as a Master's student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab working on a science–art project called Aspire Mirror, she had a similar issue with facial analysis software: it detected her face only when she wore a white mask. Buolamwini's curiosity led her to run one of her profile images across four facial recognition demos, which, she discovered, either couldn't identify a face at all or misgendered her – a bias that she refers to as the "coded gaze". She then decided to test 1270 faces of politicians from three African and three European countries, with different features, skin tones and gender, which became her Master's thesis project "Gender Shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification" (figure 1).

From car insurance quotes to which posts you see on social media, our online lives are guided by invisible, inscrutable algorithms. They help private companies and governments make decisions -- or automate them altogether -- using massive amounts of data. But despite how crucial they are to everyday life, most people don't understand how algorithms use their data to make decisions, which means serious problems can go undetected. The New Zealand government has a plan to address this problem with what officials are calling the world's first algorithm charter: a set of rules and principles for government agencies to follow when implementing algorithms that allow people to peek under the hood. By leading the way with responsible algorithm oversight, New Zealand hopes to set a model for other countries by demonstrating the value of transparency about how algorithms affect daily life.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. When Timnit Gebru attended a prestigious AI research conference last year, she counted 6 black people in the audience out of an estimated 8,500. As a PhD candidate at Stanford University who has published a number of notable papers in the field of artificial intelligence, Gebru finds the lack of diversity in the industry to be "extremely alarming" and effectively an "international emergency."

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. When Timnit Gebru attended a prestigious AI research conference last year, she counted 6 black people in the audience out of an estimated 8,500. As a PhD candidate at Stanford University who has published a number of notable papers in the field of artificial intelligence, Gebru finds the lack of diversity in the industry to be "extremely alarming" and effectively an "international emergency."