In 2017, Holliday contributed to a RAND report<\/a> warning that resolving bias in machine learning requires hiring diverse teams and cannot be fixed through technical means alone. In 2020, he helped found the nonprofit Black in Robotics<\/a>, which works to widen the presence of Black people and other minorities in the industry. He thinks two principles from an algorithmic bill of rights<\/a> he proposed at the time could reduce the risk of deploying biased robots. One is requiring disclosures<\/a> that inform people when an algorithm is going to make a high stakes decision affecting them; the other is giving people the right to review or dispute such decisions. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is currently developing an AI Bill of Rights<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some Black roboticists say their worries about racism becoming baked into automated machines come from a mix of engineering expertise and personal experience.<\/p>\n Terrence Southern grew up in Detroit and now lives in Dallas, maintaining robots for trailer manufacturer ATW. He recalls facing barriers to entering the robotics industry, or even to being aware of it. \u201cBoth my parents worked for General Motors, and I couldn\u2019t have told you outside of The Jetsons<\/em> and Star Wars what a robot could do,\u201d Southern says. When he graduated college, he didn\u2019t see anybody who looked like him at robotics companies, and believes little has changed since\u2014which is one reason why he mentors young people interested in pursuing jobs in the field.<\/p>\n Southern believes it\u2019s too late to fully prevent the deployment of racist robots, but thinks the scale could be reduced by the assembly of high-quality datasets, as well as independent, third-party<\/a> evaluations of spurious claims made by companies building AI systems.<\/p>\n Andra Keay, managing director of industry group Silicon Valley Robotics and president of Women in Robotics<\/a>, which has more than 1,700 members around the world, also considers the racist robot experiment\u2019s findings unsurprising. The combination of systems necessary for a robot to navigate the world, she said, amounts to \u201ca big salad of everything that could possibly go wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Keay was already planning to push standards-setting bodies like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to adopt rules requiring that robots have no apparent gender and are neutral in ethnicity. With robot adoption rates on the rise as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, Keay says, she also supports the idea of the federal government maintaining a robot register<\/a> to monitor the deployment of machines by industry.<\/p>\n