AI expert Marva Bailer tells Fox News Digital how the open availability of artificial intelligence can have negative impacts and talks potential federal legislation to control it. Books about the dizzying impact of the internet and artificial intelligence are among finalists for a new book prize that aims to help fix the gender imbalance in nonfiction publishing. The shortlisted six books for the inaugural Women's Prize for Nonfiction, announced on Wednesday, include Canadian author-activist Naomi Klein's "Doppleganger," a plunge into online misinformation, and British journalist Madhumita Murgia's "Code-Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI." The 38,000 award is a sister to the 29-year-old Women's Prize for Fiction and is open to female English-language writers from any country in any nonfiction genre. The finalists also include autobiographical works -- poet Safiya Sinclair's "How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir" and British art critic Laura Cumming's "Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death."

Consider the artificially intelligent voices you hear on a regular basis. Are any of them men? Whether it's Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa, or virtually any GPS system, chances are the computerized personalities in your life are women. This gender imbalance is pervasive in fiction as well as reality. Films like "Her" and "Ex Machina" reflect our anxieties about what intelligent machines mean for humanity.

Our tech world is fraught with troubling trends when it comes to gender inequality. A recent UN report "I'd blush if I could" warns that embodied AIs like the primarily female voice assistants can actually reinforce harmful gender stereotypes. Dag Kittlaus, who co-founded Siri before its acquisition by Apple, spoke out on Twitter against the accusation on Siri's sexism: It is important to acknowledge that the gender of Siri, unlike that of other voice assistants, was configurable early on. But the product's position becomes harder to define when you notice that Siri's response to the highly inappropriate comment "You're a slut" is in fact the title of the UN report: "I'd blush if I could." Therefore, in this article I'd like to discuss the social and cultural aspects of voice assistants, and specifically, why they are designed with gender, what ethical concerns this causes, and how we can fix this issue.

To send a link to this page you must be logged in. The high tech company DeepMind is paying to set up a scholarship programme for those wanting to graduate at the Mile End campus. The Masters degree is supported by the Institute of Coding and backed by the government to correct "the gender imbalance" in advanced technology which is said to be under-represented by women by three-to-one. "Queen Mary is determined to do its part to break down the barriers that discourage women from digital education," the university's programme manager Isobel Bates said. "The scholarship programme will play a role in helping us tackle the gender imbalance by encouraging women take up the subject at graduate level."

We present a large-scale study of gender bias in occupation classification, a task where the use of machine learning may lead to negative outcomes on peoples' lives. We analyze the potential allocation harms that can result from semantic representation bias. To do so, we study the impact on occupation classification of including explicit gender indicators---such as first names and pronouns---in different semantic representations of online biographies. Additionally, we quantify the bias that remains when these indicators are "scrubbed," and describe proxy behavior that occurs in the absence of explicit gender indicators. As we demonstrate, differences in true positive rates between genders are correlated with existing gender imbalances in occupations, which may compound these imbalances.

Gender gaps persist in many developed nations and in many fields, and the growing field of artificial intelligence is no exception. In fact, the AI jobs outlook is not looking so great when it comes to gender diversity. Rankings released in December by the World Economic Forum showed that the United States, India, Germany, Switzerland, and Canada have the world's five most concentrated AI workforces. The AI workforce in general has expanded considerably in recent years, with the number of workers with AI skills growing by 190 percent between 2015 and 2017, according to an analysis by LinkedIn. However, the rankings on gender diversity were less than impressive, reflecting an issue that affects the tech industry as a whole but with particular implications for AI and machine learning: a lack of diversity and inclusivity in a workforce that is designing solutions for the future.

The challenges of making the technology industry a more welcoming place for women are numerous, especially in the booming field of artificial intelligence. To get a sense of just how monumental a task the tech community faces, look no further than the marquee gathering for AI's top scientists. Preparations for this year's event drew controversy not only because there weren't enough female speakers or study authors. The biggest debate was over the conference's name. The annual Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems, formerly known as NIPS, had become a punchline symbol about just how bad the gender imbalance is for artificial intelligence.

Since the 1980s the number of women completing computer science degrees has plummeted, and in most large tech companies the representation of women in technical roles is below 30%. This lack of diversity prevents us from building products that work for everybody. It can foster toxic "brogrammer" cultures which harm everybody who works within them, and it deprives teams of the well-documented performance boost that women bring. Many of the early superstars in computer science were women -- from Lord Byron's polymath daughter Ada Lovelace, the first person to envisage a general purpose computer, to Rear Admiral Grace Hooper, who pioneered the use of natural language in writing computer programs. Similarly, the post-war computing scene was dominated by women.

Kate Chan, a 30-year-old digital marketer in Silicon Valley, first approached dating apps with a blend of curiosity and hope that they'd help her find a great guy. But after six months of dead-end mismatches with guys she thought were boring or work-obsessed, she has gone back to what she called "meeting the old-fashioned way": without a screen. She now meets guys at do-it-yourself crafting meetups and her rock-climbing gym. "I didn't want to rely on the algorithms anymore," she said. "When it comes down to it, I really have to see that person face to face, to get that intuition, that you don't get in a digital way." The singles of Silicon Valley, the heart of America's technological ambition, spend much of their lives in quiet devotion to the power of the almighty algorithm, driven by the belief that technology can solve the world's most troubling ills.

Much of the focus on artificial intelligence has been on the impact that task automation will have on jobs. While PwC expects that the nature of jobs will change and that some will be susceptible to automation, their newest research, Sizing the prize, shows that AI-driven products and services will also generate significant economic value, offsetting job gains, as well as boosting productivity and average wage levels. Organisations still need to develop approaches to embed AI responsibly into our workplaces and to secure the right talent to make the most of the opportunities created. MARGINALIA spoke with PwC's AI Programme Leader, Rob McCargow (pictured right), to explore the key findings from their new report. McCargow is deeply involved in the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, and so shares important ethical considerations and advice around how to maximise AI efforts in a way that benefit the enterprise, its people, and the society.