As Fei-Fei Li sees it, this is a historical moment for civilization fueled by an artificial intelligence revolution. “I call everything leading up to the second decade of the twenty-first century AI in-vitro,” the Stanford computer science professor told the audience at last week’s White House Frontiers Conference. Heretofore, the technology was being fundamentally understood, formulated, and tested in labs. “At this point we’re going AI in-vivo,” she said. “AI is going to be deployed in society on every aspect of industrial and personal needs.”

It’s already around us in the form of Google searches, voice-recognition, and autonomous vehicles. Which makes this a critical time to talk about diversity.

The lack of diversity in AI is representative of  the state of computer science and the tech industry in general. In the United States, for example, women and ethnic minorities such as African-Americans and Latinos are especially underrepresented. Just 18 percent of computer science grads today are women, down from a peak of 37 percent in 1984, according to The American Association of University Women. The problem is worse in AI. At the Recode conference this summer, …[Read more]