Technology is only as good as its creators and like all else, there is racism in the creation of technology. Experts say the technology used in driverless cars may not only be racist but also dangerous.

“Train a self-driving car to recognize human figures by showing it millions of pictures of white people, and it might struggle to identify pedestrians of other races,” researchers from Georgia Tech found, according to a Guardian report.

When “machine vision” systems were called on to recognize pedestrians with different skin tones, the results were shocking. “AI systems were consistently better at identifying pedestrians with lighter skin tones than darker. And not by a little bit: one headline comparison suggests that a white person was 10% more likely to be correctly identified as a pedestrian than a Black person,” the Guardian reported.

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 48: Diishan Imira
Part 2: Jamarlin continues his interview with Diishan Imira, founder of hair-care platform Mayvenn. They discuss how Diishan was mentored to think like a boss and “ask for the check,” and how much it meant to him to have investor Richelieu Dennis in his cap table. They also discuss New York progressives bangin’ back against Amazon and the growing negative sentiment against big tech.

What this means is that if this technology doesn’t recognize a Black person as a pedestrian, it could cause an accident, and possibly a fatal one if the car does not stop when there is a Black pedestrian in the street.

“The good news is that most actually existing self-driving cars use more than one type of sensor, including several that do not rely on visible light at all: Tesla cars, for instance, have a radar built in to the front of the vehicle, while Google’s Waymo uses a bulky, but extraordinarily accurate Lidar system instead; think radar but with lasers,” the Guardian reported.

Driverless cars may have proved safer than human drivers. Still, this begs the question: for which pedestrians?