In 1878, Christopher Sholes was granted the patent on the QWERTY keyboard layout. He’d been granted the patent on the , 10 years earlier. His original typewriter had problems with tangling mechanical keys and the QWERTY keyboard was his solution to broken keyboards and frustrated typists. The QWERTY keyboard favored left-handed typists (at a time when most technology favored right-handed users) and placed less commonly used letters under a typists resting fingers. Sholes, thinking very much like a founder who wanted to sell a lot of product, ensuring salespeople could easily demo the product. That one decision played a big part in the makeup of the typewriter. typewriter in 1868 ensured the word TYPEWRITER was designed into the top row of the keyboard You are probably reading this article on a computer that has the same QWERTY keyboard layout as a typewriter from 1878. You and everyone who owns one of . While there are other layouts, QWERTY has become the default layout. the ~270M computers that were sold last year finally woke up to the problem with accepting defaults when, while using generic facial recognition software on video captured from her webcam, her face could not be detected by the software. The same software detected the faces of her roommate. Joy had experienced this same issue playing peek-a-boo with social robots in her undergraduate days at MIT, but she’d let it slide back then as it was . Joy Buolamwini someone else’s problem to fix On a trip to Singapore, a few years after the undergrad incident, another social robot, this one built by a Singaporean startup, again failed to detect Joy’s face. While detecting the faces of her fellow travelers. Thousands of miles across the world, Joy realized that this Singaporean startup had used the same generic facial recognition software she’d used at MIT to develop their robot. The issue was that no black faces had been included in the data set used to train the machine learning software. Joy had found ‘ ; there was a problem with this code base that was being used to build facial recognition software. Algorithmic Bias’ default , Adam Grant highlights the result of a study by Mike Housman, which showed that customer service & call center employees who changed the default browser (Internet Explorer) on their work computers to Chrome or Firefox performed better than their peers who didn’t. tend to take fewer original steps in their lives. The suggestion is that these people who do not accept the default have the ability to improve things for themselves. Might they be able to improve things for others by not accepting other that we all experience? In Originals The suggestion is that those who keep their default browsers defaults There are defaults all around us, guiding and molding our lives without us realizing. Embedded in these defaults are the biases and quirks of the people who set up these structures. Some of them we are starting to fix (like above) and . We live in a time when we can use the technology available to us to change . some we’ve only just started to question a lot of the defaults that we now take for granted Thankfully, Joy is doing the work of removing the biases inherent in the defaults in machine learning software. She’s launched the (AJL) and we can all sign up to . As facial recognition software becomes a bigger part of , we all need to work with entities like AJL to ensure the defaults do not disenfranchise a swathe of society. Algorithmic Justice League reconfigure the defaults policing and our societal decision-making structures It’s time for us to look around. What have you discovered that need to be changed? defaults Please like, tweet, share and heart the article if you enjoyed reading it. Sign up for my Polymathic Monthly Newsletter here , you’ll love it. Also, check out HarperJacobs for compelling content creation for your company.
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