It doesn't matter if you're a Republican or a Democrat.
Either way, someone from your side of the aisle is campaigning or complaining about job-killing robots and discriminatory artificial intelligence.
Campaign issue: robots replacing human jobs
In Portland, Oregon, near SecureWorld headquarters, some members of our team received this mailer over the weekend in a highly competitive state representative race:
"Can you be replaced with robots? Janelle Bynum seems to think so."
The flyer accuses the Democratic candidate (and incumbent) of replacing "working family jobs with automated machines" at the local McDonalds stores she owns.
With automation and robots doing an increasing number of jobs around the globe, this is probably just the start of hearing about this as a campaign issue, especially where large numbers of workers are displaced.
SecureWorld reported on this topic recently, after the World Economic Forum issued its robots and jobs prediction.
In case you missed it, the prediction for what happens over the next five years indicates a lot of pain...and
- By 2022, robots take over 75 million human jobs
- By 2022, 133 million new jobs will be created as a result of the artificial intelligence and the robot revolution
Read the robots and jobs study for yourself if you'd like.
Congressional inquiry: is artificial intelligence discriminating
Artificial intelligence and its ability to power facial recognition algorithms for decision making
As we've reported, biases can be baked into artificial intelligence.
The U.S. Senators wrote a letter to the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, asking the agencies to look at the AI threats. Their request reads in part:
"Suppose, for example, that an African American woman seeks a job at a company that uses facial analysis to assess how well a candidate’s mannerisms are similar to those of its top managers.
First, the technology may interpret her mannerisms less accurately than a white male candidate.
Second, if the company’s top managers are homogeneous, e.g., white and male, the very characteristics being sought may have nothing to do with job performance but are instead artifacts of belonging to this group. She may be as qualified for the job as a white male candidate, but facial analysis may not rate her as highly
Third, if a particular history of biased promotions led to homogeneity in top managers, then the facial recognition analysis technology could encode and then hide this bias behind a scientific veneer of objectivity."
Read the Senate's letter of inquiry about biases in artificial intelligence and facial recognition, if you'd like.
As our team has been traveling this fall to SecureWorld cybersecurity conferences around the U.S., we've seen the TV commercials about "tax and spend liberals" and "
Let's face it, these themes have been around for a while.
Now we're wondering: how long until ads appear with cybersecurity, job-killing robots or artificial intelligence as a new type of campaign theme?
Send us a tip if you see any of these: media@secureworldexpo.com
Because these buzzwords are now part of the mainstream, as Google showed us just last week.
