In Dune, computers don’t exist anymore due to the old Butlerian Jihad against thinking machines. Are we heading toward our own Butlerian Jihad against artificial intelligence for its tendency to be the little boy who points out that the emperor has no clothes on embarrassing questions of race? From Futurism:

Scientists Built an AI to Give Ethical Advice, But It Turned Out Super Racist

The bot is supposed to offer descriptive ethical advice, but some say it does more harm than good.

by TONY TRAN

We’ve all been in situations where we had to make tough ethical decisions. Why not dodge that pesky responsibility by outsourcing the choice to a machine learning algorithm?

That’s the idea behind Ask Delphi, a machine-learning model from the Allen Institute for AI …

The project launched last week, and has subsequently gone viral online for seemingly all the wrong reasons. Much of the advice and judgements it’s given have been… fraught, to say the least.

For example, when a user asked Delphi what it thought about “a white man walking towards you at night,” it responded “It’s okay.”

But when they asked what the AI thought about “a black man walking towards you at night” its answer was clearly racist. …

“It’s concerning.”