Members of the Black employees group worked with Nvidia colleagues to warn the CEO of the issue.
In 2020, Masheika Allgood and Alexander Tsado, former presidents of the Nvidia Black employees group, tried to warn the company’s CEO Jensen Huang that AI technology posed a risk, particularly to visible minorities.
The pair had spent a year working with their company colleagues on the presentation for the CEO.
That said, the pair left the meeting feeling frustrated and that their message had not been heard regarding the danger of AI technology to people, particularly those who are visible minorities.
In a recent Bloomberg News report, the media company discussed documents including a deck of 22 slides for the presentation and Nvidia’s rising role in the future of artificial intelligence. The documents stated that the company’s chips were moving artificial intelligence toward ubiquity, cautioning that it was inevitable that regulatory scrutiny would increase.
The documents also underscored direct instances of facial recognition tech biases used by the self-driving car industry. The goal, according to the Bloomberg News report, was to identify a strategy to take on the potentially disastrous and yet unintentional consequences of artificial intelligence, the results of which were likely to be first experienced by minority communities.
According to Tsado and Allgood, the AI technology meeting mainly involved Huang doing the talking.
The pair stated that they had not felt listened to and weren’t under the impression that Nvidia would make a priority of building a way to address potential bias in artificial intelligence tech that could place minority groups at risk.
Tsado worked for the company as a product marketing manager. According to Bloomberg News, Tsado wanted Huang to understand how critical the artificial intelligence technology issue was and how important it would be to address it right away. Tsado stated that while the CEO might have had the luxury of delaying action, but “I am a member of the underserved communities, and so there’s nothing more important to me than this. We’re building these tools and I’m looking at them and I’m thinking, this is not going to work for me because I’m Black.”
