A new study claims robots exhibit racist and sexist stereotyping when the artificial intelligence (AI) that powers them is modeled on data from the internet. The study, which researchers say is the first to prove the concept, was led by Johns Hopkins University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Washington, and published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Researchers will be initially presenting their findings at the 2022 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, which is being held in South Korea. This isn't the first time exposure to the internet has left AI with bigoted views. Back in 2016, Microsoft launched an AI named Tay.

Human surgeons are some of the most skilled, precise individuals on the planet, but no amount of training and experience can make them better at slicing human flesh than robots already are. A new study aimed at comparing the steady hand of a human surgeon against the cold precision of the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) revealed just how much better a bot really is, and what that means for patients going under its knife. The research pitted the surgical bot, which is still in active development, against a human surgeons operating on a human analog -- in this particular case, it was pig tissue including muscle, fat, and of course skin. The cuts made by both the human doctors and the STAR were judged based on how precise their cuts were as well as how much damage was done to the flesh surrounding the incision. The STAR system not only produced more precise cuts in terms of length, but they were also closer to the "perfect" line and the incision caused less damage to the flesh.