TIME

Is technology capable of being racist?

When engineers make racially insensitive mistakes, it doesn’t always mean they are racists

WE ARE TOLD OF LATE THAT WE MUST entertain whether technology can be a racist. Like when Google Photos, in 2015, algorithmically identified black people as gorillas. Or earlier this year when Microsoft’s Twitterbot Tay, designed to emulate human conversation by trawling tweets, sucked up racist nonsense along with everything else and started spouting some of its own. Or when, in August, Snapchat offered a selfie-altering filter that rendered users as an

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