The DOI matches its Crossref record; 24 of the 26 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Ugly Truth About Ourselves and Our Robot Creations: The Problem of Bias and Social Inequity
Abstract
Recently, there has been an upsurge of attention focused on bias and its impact on specialized artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Allegations of racism and sexism have permeated the conversation as stories surface about search engines delivering job postings for well-paying technical jobs to men and not women, or providing arrest mugshots when keywords such as "black teenagers" are entered. Learning algorithms are evolving; they are often created from parsing through large datasets of online information while having truth labels bestowed on them by crowd-sourced masses. These specialized AI algorithms have been liberated from the minds of researchers and startups, and released onto the public. Yet intelligent though they may be, these algorithms maintain some of the same biases that permeate society. They find patterns within datasets that reflect implicit biases and, in so doing, emphasize and reinforce these biases as global truth. This paper describes specific examples of how bias has infused itself into current AI and robotic systems, and how it may affect the future design of such systems. More specifically, we draw attention to how bias may affect the functioning of (1) a robot peacekeeper, (2) a self-driving car, and (3) a medical robot. We conclude with an overview of measures that could be taken to mitigate or halt bias from permeating robotic technology.
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“Human-induced bias is intentionally or unintentionally written by the developers because individuals are always influenced by their own moral perceptions and relevant interests, which affects data training”
From Ethics and governance of trustworthy medical artificial intelligence (2023) · cites this paper as [26]
In the citing paper
“Various high-profle controversies (e.g.[10,22,112]) have raised concerns over the technology's potential to both perpetuate existing societal inequalities and introduce new types of discrimination [52,67,116].”
From Out of Context: Investigating the Bias and Fairness Concerns of “Artificial Intelligence as a Service” (2023) · cites this paper as [67]
In the citing paper
“AI applications released to the public are not free from racial and gender biases (Chen, Szolovits & Ghassemi, 2019; Howard & Borenstein, 2018).”
From Digital ageism: challenges and opportunities in artificial intelligence for older adults (2022) · cites this paper as Howard & Borenstein, 2018
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2 of the 26 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.
Research works printed but not linked: 4
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Items 101–102 of 102
Word embeddings are biased. But whose bias are they reflecting?
Petreski, D., & Hashim, I. (2022) · AI & Society · doi:10.1007/s00146-022-01443-w · Cited by 20
Design Justice for Robot Design and Policy Making
Ostrowski, A. K., & Breazeal, C. (2022) · 2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) · doi:10.1109/hri53351.2022.9889557 · Cited by 3
Metadata
- Authors
- Howard, A., & Borenstein, J.
- Affiliations
- Georgia Institute of Technology (US)
- Corresponding author
- Borenstein, Jason
- Venue
- Science and Engineering Ethics
- Published
- 2017-09-21
- Volume
- 24
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1521-1536
- ISSN
- 1353-3452 (ISSN-L)
- 1471-5546
- OpenAlex
- W2760062370
- Cited by
- 337
- References
- 26
- Citations by year
- 2026: 29 · 2025: 64 · 2024: 53 · 2023: 59 · 2022: 38 · 2021: 49 · 2020: 27 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 28.19
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Science and Engineering Ethics (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › Law › Artificial Intelligence in Law
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
- Keywords
- algorithmic bias, artificial intelligence, social inequities, implicit bias, racial bias, gender bias, autonomous vehicles, medical robots, bias mitigation, robot ethics
- MeSH terms
- Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Automobiles, Female, Humans, Learning, Male, Prejudice, Robotics, Social Justice, Bias, Biomedical Technology, Racism, Sexism, Datasets as Topic
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