Jimmy Gomez is a California Democrat, a Harvard graduate and one of the few Hispanic lawmakers serving in the US House of Representatives. But to Amazon's facial recognition system, he looks like a potential criminal. Gomez was one of 28 US Congress members falsely matched with mugshots of people who've been arrested, as part of a test the American Civil Liberties Union ran last year of the Amazon Rekognition program. Nearly 40 percent of the false matches by Amazon's tool, which is being used by police, involved people of color. This is part of a CNET special report exploring the benefits and pitfalls of facial recognition.

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.

On a sunny Monday afternoon in Oakland, AI4All alum Ananya Karthik gathered a few dozen girls to show them how to use the Deep Dream Generator program to fuse images together and create a unique piece of art. OAKLAND -- Through connections made at summer camp, high school students Aarvu Gupta and Lili Sun used artificial intelligence to create a drone program that aims to detect wildfires before they spread too far. Rebekah Agwunobi, a rising high school senior, learned enough to nab an internship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, working on using artificial intelligence to evaluate the court system, including collecting data on how judges set bail. Both projects stemmed from the Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit AI4All, which will expand its outreach to young under-represented minorities and women with a $1 million grant from Google.org, the technology giant's philanthropic arm announced Friday. Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly commonplace in daily life, found in everything from Facebook's face detection feature for photos to Apple's iPhone X facial recognition.

State and local police began using facial recognition in the early 2000s. The early systems were notoriously unreliable, but today law-enforcement agencies in Chicago, Dallas, West Virginia, and elsewhere have acquired or are actively considering more sophisticated surveillance camera systems. Some of these systems can capture the faces of passersby and identify them in real-time. Sheriff's departments across Florida and Southern California have been outfitted with smartphone or tablet facial recognition systems that can be used to run drivers and pedestrians against mug shot databases. In fact, Florida and several other states enroll every driver's license photo in their facial recognition databases. Now, with the click of a button, many police departments can identify a suspect caught committing a crime on camera, verify the identity of a driver who does not produce a license, or search a state driver's license database for suspected fugitives.