Domestic robots of the future will hand a man a cold beer when he enters the kitchen and offer his wife assistance with the washing up.
Academics have warned that this will be the outcome of “sexist” artificial intelligence being developed by companies such as Facebook and Google unless remedial action is taken.
Silicon Valley companies “train” their artificial intelligence on collections of hundreds of thousands of captioned images, so their software can interpret other, unlabelled pictures.
Researchers from US universities found that these datasets were biased, containing more pictures of women working in the kitchen and more of men playing sport, for example.
Significantly, they found that algorithms trained on those datasets amplified that bias to come to sexist false conclusions.
Kai-Wei Chang, of…