Mark Reviews Movies: CODED BIAS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 19, 2020

As technology makes certain things easier and more convenient, we are becoming less curious and less skeptical about how that technology operates. The subject of Coded Bias is artificial intelligence, which most of us use or encounter every day with little serious thought.

Our homes have personal assistants of sorts in the forms of talking boxes or the helpful voices on our smartphones. Our interactions online, through search engines and social media, are influenced by algorithms, which point us in one direction or another toward some advertising or set of ideas.

Someone programmed these things, and while we think that computers and codes are objective and mathematical, the human beings who created them are not. Director Shalini Kantayya begins this film with a discovery made by a Black MIT student, who learned that facial recognition software had difficulty even registering the presence her face. When she put on a white mask, the program identified a face instantly.

It's likely that nobody meant for this to happen, but it did. What other biases might technology reveal? As society becomes more dependent on artificial intelligence to make things easier, how much harder will these programmed biases, either unintentional or—should a programmer or many become so boldly prejudiced—with purpose, make life for certain groups of people?

These are vital questions, and Kantayya approaches them with both a sense of urgency and current—as in happening right now—real-world examples of biased technology and how it's affecting people. The inability for facial-recognition technology to identify people with certain skin tones is just the start. What if, for example, that technology was used by government law-enforcement agencies to identify suspicious people and got it wrong?

Well, that's a rhetorical question, because it's already happening (Kantayya follows a civil rights organization in London, fighting the possibility of such faulty technology being incorporated throughout the city). Companies are also using artificial intelligence to hasten the job application process. Colleges are using it to determine if an applicant should be accepted. Banks are using it to determine who does and doesn't get a loan.

It's a problem that's only going to get worse. Coded Bias is a frightening warning, not only about the future risks and consequences of leaving technology unexplored and unquestioned, but also of how far along these issues have come without any of us noticing or particularly caring.

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