Published paper finds similar pedestrian detection rates across skin tones
Kelsey Piper reviewed a claim tracing from The Atlantic through a Union of Concerned Scientists report to a 2023 preprint that asserted a 7.52 percent higher miss rate for dark-skinned pedestrians. The version published in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology reported average miss rates of 30.15 percent for light-skinned individuals and 29.71 percent for dark-skinned individuals. The tested systems were not commercial deployments. Leading operators such as Waymo rely on lidar and imaging radar that detect presence independent of skin tone.
New “datacenters consume all the world’s water” just dropped
Are autonomous vehicles (self-driving cars) “less able to detect people of color”? That’s what I read in The Atlantic this weekend, in Xochitl Gonzalez’s “People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions.” It appears to be entirely false.