Artificial Intelligence is being accused of fueling inequality and climate change as revealed by a new report.

Recently, a paper was published by the AI Now Institute with a title AI Now 2019 Report and it is highlighting the societal impacts of artificial intelligence and is also putting in front some recommendations for the tech industry and policymakers.

The artificial intelligence is being controlled by the people who already have power and is promoting inequality, and disempowering people who lack power.

According to the claims by AI Now, the artificial intelligence industry is promoting the mistreatment and discrimination of workers as the tech companies are moving more towards facial recognition technologies and ignoring the facts that these energy-running A.I. systems are the reason behind the increase of carbon dioxide in the environment.

According to the co-founder of AI Now Kate Crawford, her organization is concerned about the effects of the recognition technology that is promoting to determine the personality or emotional state of a person via their facial expression and this type of technology is being used by vet job applicants, to track students and to gather data on the emotional states of shoppers inside the stores. So the organization is asking for a ban on this technology before it can be used in furthermore critical decisions like hiring.

In this report AI NOW 2019, the researchers also recommend Senator Bernie Sanders to make a ban on police facial recognition as a part of his presidential campaign to help stop the misuse before its too late.

Another major concern raised via this report is the impact of power-hungry artificial intelligence programs on the environment and AI Now also displayed a report of a group of University of Massachusetts, Amherst which determined that the energy consumed by A.I. training model produced 600,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions and due to this reason the only solution provided by the researchers of AI was to put completely end the usages of carbon dioxide emitting technology to stop the increase of climate change.

This report also highlights the issue of Biometric Information Privacy as it can be used to track a person easily so the recommendations also include the enabling of the Biometric Information Privacy act so that legal action can be taken against the collection of biometric information by a person or company without consent.

Another issue raised in this report was the lack of diversity in the tech industry, as the tech industry is slowly squeezing out the involvement of human employees which means the tech works cant speak about the ethical concerns regarding their work to A.I. enabled systems as most of the department decisions are now being down by the A.I. enabled systems which are inaccessible to the workers and the public.

According to the report, three municipalities in the United States have already banned the use of facial recognition from the government and the San Francisco, Oakland, and Somerville, Massachusetts have stalled its use so far.

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Artificial Intelligence might be a factor behind the Climate Change - Digital Information World