Could AI robots develop prejudice on their own?

[rangerrebew]

Could AI robots develop prejudice on their own?
September 6, 2018, Cardiff University
 

Showing prejudice towards others does not require a high level of cognitive ability and could easily be exhibited by artificially intelligent machines, new research has suggested.

Computer science and psychology experts from Cardiff University and MIT have shown that groups of autonomous machines could demonstrate prejudice by simply identifying, copying and learning this behaviour from one another.

It may seem that prejudice is a human-specific phenomenon that requires human cognition to form an opinion of, or to stereotype, a certain person or group.

https://techxplore.com/news/2018-09-ai-robots-prejudice.html

[sneakypete]

Not a chance. Even human teens that spend all their waking hours on a cell phone or computer don't develop a personality.

[The_Reader_David]

The answer to the headline question is, of course, since that's exactly what an AI system made for interacting with the real world is designed to do:  after some interactions, it begins to prejudge upcoming interactions based on their similarity to prior interactions, rather than treating each one as a completely new circumstance (to which it would react randomly).  Doing the latter would be called artificial naivety, rather than artificial intelligence.  Recognizable analogues of human prejudices will arise when those prejudices have a statistical basis, the more rapidly and more strongly, the stronger the statistical basis for the prejudice, as they will if the training data is unwittingly (or maliciously) biased.