68% of people say techies inject their own bias into products, study shows

A recent study asked whether participants believed that technology contains biases. The answer of the majority: a resounding yes

The study carried out for the conference Fortune 2018 Brainstorm Tech, showed that 63% of the respondents considered that the technology did more to justify biased decisions instead of eliminating prejudices from the decision-making process. Of the 2,100 respondents, 70% felt that technology amplifies people's prejudices rather than decreasing them. More than two-thirds of respondents blamed technology creators for injecting their own biases, instead of blaming the technology itself.

According to Fortune Jon Cohen, the research chief of SurveyMonkey, said that study was a first of its kind, citing that the words "technology" and "bias" do not appear together in another important investigation.

The bias in technology products manifests itself in a variety of ways. Google made the headlines in 2009, when the search term "white people stole my car" automatically suggested below "Did you mean: black people stole my car."

Facial recognition is also susceptible to bias. The facial detection software is created by tests on real faces . If a facial recognition application is not trained with a sufficient amount of dark-skinned faces, it will have more difficulty in analyzing these types of faces. With law enforcement using facial recognition for locating criminals confusion could have disastrous consequences.

We see a similar bias in the realm of virtual assistants like Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Alexa's of Amazon. all mainly women. In an interview with NPR Alex Spinelli, the leader of the team that created Alexa, noted why he chose a female voice for the assistant.

"The idea was to create the computer Star Trek ," said Spinelli. As to why the creator of Star Trek Gene Roddenberry chose to make the female voice, we may never know it, although some researchers believe that the underlying motive is the way we see women in society. Domestic work, health care, office assistants – these are all highly feminized industries – and also often poorly paid and low status, with precarious working conditions, "said Miriam Sweeney, researcher at University of Alabama. ]

Being aware of this and other prejudices has done little to change our preferences. Despite the subtle sexism of a female virtual assistant, for example, our entrenched prejudices continue to color our decisions: Both men and women trust a female vocal assistant