Commentary: AI flaws could make your next car racist

Synthetic Black people have been depicted in film, such as in last year’s Pixar movie ‘Soul’. But behind the scenes, the lighting artists found that they had to push the software far outside its default settings and learn all new lighting techniques to create these characters. — Disney/Pixar/TNS

Tesla recently announced the newest version of its self-driving car software, following the software’s role in a dozen reported collisions with emergency vehicles that are the subject of a federal agency probe.

While these collisions happened for a variety of reasons, a major factor may be that the artificial intelligence driving the car is not used to seeing flashing lights and vehicles pulled over on the shoulder, so the underlying algorithms react in unpredictable and catastrophic ways.