> was it deliberately designed to hassle black women or anyone else with dreadlocks?
Does it really matter when that's the end result and there is no intention or effort to fix it? Harm is harm, that the harm was intentional or not doesn't really matter when the harm is ongoing.
If your house is on fire, the first concern is to make it no be on fire, only after that does the question of intent have any relevance. And if somebody wilfully attempts to stop the process of making the house not be on fire, they should be considered intentionally harmful and no different from pyromaniacs until proven otherwise. Either way they should be removed post-haste.
- Don't deploy a system that has this many false alerts (and that is what even the TSA calls them, they are not interested in finding dense hair)
- Stop continuing to use this stuff and spend money on it if we aren't seeing any benefit, and are seeing demonstrable harm.
- Don't replace human judgement with blind procedure that must be followed, when that procedure depends on a known flawed technology that isn't providing any demonstrable benefit.
- Accept that even if you want this kind of tech to exist, it isn't there yet, and you aren't going to "fix it in code" by adding a race variable.
Bottom line is, nobody is forcing us to use these machines / procedures. We aren't stuck with them and have to figure out some way to patch the code or we're all doomed, so we don't have to be so reductive about how we fix it. We could just say, this was a failed idea and throw it the hell out.
Does it really matter when that's the end result and there is no intention or effort to fix it? Harm is harm, that the harm was intentional or not doesn't really matter when the harm is ongoing.
If your house is on fire, the first concern is to make it no be on fire, only after that does the question of intent have any relevance. And if somebody wilfully attempts to stop the process of making the house not be on fire, they should be considered intentionally harmful and no different from pyromaniacs until proven otherwise. Either way they should be removed post-haste.