Numlock Sunday: Karen Hao on Facial Recognition and Policing

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Karen Hao who writes about AI for MIT Technology Review. Here's a story of her’s from last week:

Though police bodycams were supposed to bring an extra level of accountability to the work of policing, in reality they have come up short in the very places they were most needed. An analysis of 105 police killings captured by bodycams in 2017 found that 40 of them never saw the light of day, not being released to the public to undergo scrutiny. The policies about bodycams are written by the police departments themselves, and large randomized trials have found that there’s no statistical difference in behavior between cops who have a camera and cops who don’t.

I wanted to talk to Karen because this was a big week for AI, including major changes to what kin…