Jonathan Zittrain compares AI to asbestos in an article for the Harvard Gazette.
“Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard’s George Bemis Professor of Law and director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said that, done wrong, AI in health care could be analogous to the cancer-causing asbestos that was used for decades in buildings across the U.S., with widespread harmful effects not immediately apparent. Zittrain pointed out that image analysis software, while potentially useful in medicine, is also easily fooled. By changing a few pixels of an image of a cat — still clearly a cat to human eyes — MIT students prompted Google image software to identify it, with 100 percent certainty, as guacamole. Further, a well-known study by researchers at MIT and Stanford showed that three commercial facial-recognition programs had both gender and skin-type biases.”