After interviewing a largely optimistic Russell I took a walk around the Berkeley campus, feeling a little adrift (and retrospectively sorry not to have called Laura). Russell recognises that if it’s largely white men who are in charge of machine learning they might be less tuned into the biases in the data but feels that there can be technical solutions. It may be that recruitment decisions made by algorithms start off reflecting the prejudices of the humans that they initially emulate but with care it should be possible to engineer that out. As the image shows, sandals are still worn on campus.
