Microsoft has been issued a highly controversial patent that allows one to create a pedestrian-based route that avoids traveling through an “unsafe neighborhood”. Dubbed the “Avoid Ghetto Patent”, a “generation component…can analyze the information and construct a direction set that allows the user to take paths that take him to his home in a quickest amount of time while keeping the user relatively safe (e.g., taking the user through neighborhoods with violent crime statistics below a certain threshold).”
The system can employ an “artificial intelligence component” to draw “inferences” or “capture logical relationships such as theorem provers or more heuristic rule-based expert systems.” So if the “artifical intelligence component” determines that a potential pedestrian path might cross into an area having certain demographics, presumately the software would advise avoiding this area.
One can see how “inferences” might be drawn between the ethnicity or race of persons in an area and the area being considered “unsafe”.
So the question is: Why would Microsoft want the bad PR from such a controversial patent?
What were they thinking?
