近來，我無意中聽到自己兩歲的女兒與亞馬遜（Amazon）的語音助手Alexa對話。期間有兩件事震驚了我：第一，女兒無法分辨機械音與人聲的區別；第二，無論從哪種社會習俗的角度來看，她給Alexa發布指令的方式都很無禮。

我突然意識到，Alexa給我女兒樹立了一個糟糕的榜樣——女性應該卑順、忍受無禮的行為并待在家里，這讓我感到十分困擾。

四大家居人工智能（AI）助手——Alexa、蘋果（Apple）的Siri、谷歌（Google）的Google Assistant和微軟（Microsoft）的Cortana——默認使用的全都是女聲。在最近一次抵制之前，它們設定的溫柔順從的人格也存在著過分的性別歧視。我女兒的經歷引發了我對這種微妙的AI性別歧視的關注，我擔心情況會很快變得更糟。

全球最大的那些技術平臺今年推出的新服務，將很快與消費者之間進行交流并形成標準。為了高效率地處理數百萬條信息，這些公司必須推出自己的AI助手。因此，助手機器人的類型很快就會增加到幾千種，并在網頁、應用和社交網絡上與數十億用戶進行交流。

隨著這種“交流型AI”的用途迅速增加，它隱含的性別歧視會在我們、包括我們孩子的世界中迅速發酵。微妙的暗示通過不斷重復，會產生累加的效果，隨著時間的推移，形成一種病態的心理狀況。如今，它正在悄悄影響我們，因為我們使用助手機器人的時間還相對較短，可能每天只有幾分鐘。不過，隨著它們開始完全取代網頁和應用，AI很快就會變得普遍許多。

如果我們不做出改變，編寫現有的性別歧視算法和腳本的這批人將會創造出下一代對話型AI，而它們的規模則會以指數形式增長。隨著對話型AI在全球推廣，那些讓AI系統把女性定位為廚娘和秘書，把男性定位為高管的工程師，將會把他們的偏見成倍放大。

一切的問題在于男性。如今的AI主要由白人男性工程師開發，他們工作過于匆忙，無暇拷問自己的大男子主義或思考自己的工作可能帶來什么危害。我從1995年起擔任科技公司的首席執行官，過去這20多年來，在網頁、搜索和社交革命中，這樣的情況我曾有所目睹。AI革命才起步不久，但全球卻有一半的人口已經遭到了邊緣化。這真是我們的恥辱。

或者我應該說，這又一次成為了我們的恥辱。科技界不斷發生著連環犯罪。收入排行前20的美國科技公司中，有18家的首席執行官都是男性。Facebook、谷歌和微軟的工程師中只有五分之一是女性。而在AI領域，2017年業內專家的重要年度會議——會議神經信息處理系統大會（Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS）上，83%的出席者是男性，同年NIPS論文的作者中則有90%是男性。（由于AI領域相對較新，我們還無法獲取有關性別多樣性的更宏觀的數據。）

如果女性無法參與，我們怎么能夠開發出持久且影響深遠的AI技術？我們尚處于起步階段，但跡象卻已經令人擔憂。放任下去，恐怕會產生災難性的后果。

為了避免對話型AI引發的災難，我們公司正在積極采取措施，糾正技術人員的男性偏見，其中一種重要的方式就是在開發助手機器人時與核心員工和編碼人員保持密切聯系。根據美國勞工部（Labor Department）的數據，美國客戶服務代表中有65%是女性，這個團隊的多樣性要優于撰寫代碼的程序員，女性占比也遠高于大型科技公司中女性程序員的平均水平。

研究AI的公司應該努力平衡員工的性別，與女性領袖合作，減少男性的偏見，并主持由女性領頭的科研計劃。我們需要在研發助手機器人上提出一套最好的方案，并在整個行業內推廣。

AI具有巨大的潛力，然而取得真正進步所需的洞察力和包容性，我們尚未具備，無法讓該領域自己承擔責任。要抵御隱含偏見的重復和增強，最好的方法就是保持團隊性別的多樣性。做不到這一點，AI很快就會孕育出科技界的下一個危機。（財富中文網）

作者羅伯特·洛卡西奧是LivePerson的創始人和首席執行官。

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I recently overheard my 2-year-old daughter talking to Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa, and two things struck me. First, she doesn’t distinguish the disembodied voice from that of a regular human. Second, she barks orders at Alexa in a way that would be considered rude by any social convention.

I was suddenly aware and troubled that Alexa is setting a terrible example for my daughter—that women are subservient, should accept rudeness, and belong in the home.

All four of the major in-home artificial intelligence, or AI, assistants—Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft’s Cortana—speak by default with a female voice. Until a recent backlash, they also had docile, obedient personalities that would tolerate an exorbitant amount of sexism. The experience with my daughter opened my eyes to this subtle AI sexism, and I’m afraid it will soon get even worse.

The world’s largest tech platforms have this year launched new services that will quickly make texting between consumers and brands the norm. To handle the millions of messages efficiently, these companies will have to launch their own AI assistants. As a result, the number of assistant bots will quickly expand into the thousands, communicating with billions of consumers across websites, apps, and social networks.

As this “conversational AI” dramatically grows in usage, its sexism could get baked into the world around us, including that of our kids. Subtle reinforcement through repetition can add up, over time, to a form of problematic psychological conditioning. Today, this is quietly creeping up on us because the use of bots is still relatively low—a few minutes per day, perhaps. But soon AI will be much more ubiquitous, as bots start to replace websites and apps completely.

If we don’t change course, this next generation of conversational AI will be created by the same people who built the current sexist algorithms and scripts—but on an exponentially bigger scale. The engineers whose AI systems categorized women into kitchen and secretarial roles while offering men jobs with executive titles will have their biases massively amplified, as conversational AI goes global.

The common thread is men. The AI of today was developed by predominantly white male engineers in too much of a hurry to challenge their own chauvinism or consider the harm their work could do. As a tech company CEO since 1995, it’s a pattern I’ve seen before, during the web, search, and social revolutions of the past 20-plus years. The AI revolution started only recently, but it’s already marginalized half of the world’s population. Shame on us.

Or, I should say, shame on us again. The technology industry is a serial offender. Of the 20 largest U.S. technology firms by revenue, 18 have male CEOs. Only one in five engineers at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are women. In AI specifically, 83% of attendees at the 2017 main annual gathering of AI experts, the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference, were men, as were 90% of NIPS paper authors that year. (Wide-scale statistics on gender diversity in AI, which is relatively new as a specific sector, are not yet available.)

How can we build lasting and far-reaching AI technology if women are missing from the equation? We’re just getting started, but the signs are already worrying. Left unchecked, the results could be catastrophic.

To avert a disaster in conversational AI, one important antidote to techie male bias that we are pursuing aggressively in our company is to engage contact center staff alongside coders in building the bots. Customer service representatives—who are 65% female in the U.S., per the Labor Department—are a more diverse group than the programmers who write code, and far above the average number of female engineers at the big tech companies.

Companies working in AI should work to recruit more balanced workforces, partner with female leaders to reduce male bias, and host women-led tech initiatives. We need to develop a set of best practices in bot building and spread them across the industry.

AI has huge potential, but until the field begins to hold itself accountable, we’ll continue to miss the perspective and inclusivity we need for true progress. Diversity is our best defense against replicating and amplifying hidden biases. Without it, AI will soon birth the next crisis in the technology industry.

Robert LoCascio is the founder and CEO of LivePerson.