This week, host Sidharth Bhatia is joined by American filmmaker Shalini Kantayya, who's documentary 'Coded Bias' is currently streaming on Netflix. The documentary talks about facial recognition technology and algorithms, how they work, the moral and racial problems that they pose, and how this technology is being welcomed by police forces all over the world, from dictatorships to democracies. The documentary premiered at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in 2020. Shalini's other films include 'Catching the Sun' and 'A Drop of Life', both highly acclaimed documentaries in their own right.
On this episode, Sidharth talks to Shalini about how Coded Bias alarmed and shocked him and how people often tell Shalini that they found the documentary disturbing and terrifying, and yet, somehow hopeful. They also get into whether this is actually something that we should worry about, how AI and facial recognition technologies need to definitely be vetted for racial bias, gender bias and other forms of discrimination, whom this technology could hurt, the need for proper laws that govern this sort of tech, how in the UK this technology resulted in 85% of people being misidentified by police, how these systems and AI are being trained, and tons more. Tune in for an extremely important conversation.

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