How do algorithmic bias, our design tools, and bad habits contribute to the whitewashing of design? The everyday tools we use to navigate our daily lives and our design work drive us toward creating design solutions that are similar to those we already know and like. As a tech community that is largely driven by white people, we are constantly served images of white people. These white faces and stories end up in our personas and user-experience maps and drive our design decision making. Such bias will persist unless we acknowledge this is happening and stop the whitewashing of our design deliverables and our design solutions.

While AI does deliver ever greater opportunities for efficiencies, people who hear about this immediately fear for their job. However, successful manufacturing companies know that the key is striking the right balance between robots and people. The first step is understanding what user needs robots address. The foundation of AI is pattern recognition. Once AI learns a pattern, it can use that pattern to make predictions about the outcomes of similar patterns.

Despite our more rapid advances in machine learning, we are still far from developing a species of sentient machines or a confluence of technologies that would let each of us enjoy digital immortality. One of the most advanced artificially intelligent, humanoid robots to date is Hanson Robotics' Sophia, shown in Figure 1, which spoke at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, Switzerland in June 2017. While, in recent years, the media have focused largely on computer-related technologies, we are entering what author and futurist Dr. Michio Kaku calls "the golden age of neuroscience." In his Wall Street Journal article on this topic, he acknowledges, "We have learned more about the thinking brain in the past 10 to 15 years than in all of previous human history." Genomics is another example of astonishing scientific advancement.