The last few years have seen a proliferation of principles for AI ethics. There is substantial overlap between different sets of principles, with widespread agreement that AI should be used for the common good, should not be used to harm people or undermine their rights, and should respect widely held values such as fairness, privacy, and autonomy. While articulating and agreeing on principles is important, it is only a starting point. Drawing on comparisons with the field of bioethics, we highlight some of the limitations of principles: in particular, they are often too broad and high-level to guide ethics in practice. We suggest that an important next step for the field of AI ethics is to focus on exploring the tensions that inevitably arise as we try to implement principles in practice. By explicitly recognising these tensions we can begin to make decisions about how they should be resolved in specific cases, and develop frameworks and guidelines for AI ethics that are rigorous and practically relevant. We discuss some different specific ways that tensions arise in AI ethics, and what processes might be needed to resolve them. Read More
Monthly Archives: November 2019
MLB Umpires Missed 34,294 Ball-Strike Calls in 2018. Bring on Robo-umps?
After studying four million game pitches, BU researcher suggests how to fix a broken baseball system.
This article is based on 11 seasons of Major League Baseball data, over four million pitches culled and analyzed over two months by Boston University Master Lecturer Mark T. Williams and a team of graduate students at the Questrom School of Business experienced in data mining, analytics, and statistics. Read More
‘Tectonic shift’ of Space Command has intelligence community feeling aftershocks
Redefining space as a warfighting domain made waves throughout the defense community as they began thinking about defending assets in space. Maj. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander for Air Force Space Command, called the creation of Space Command a “tectonic shift.” Now the aftershocks of that shift are being felt in the intelligence community as analysts have to reconsider space’s role in intelligence gathering.
“When you think of space and intelligence together, you might be like me: I spent my career thinking about intelligence collection in space coming down to the Earth, intelligence from space,” Shaw said on Agency in Focus: Intelligence Community. “We need to think really, really hard now about intelligence for space. Where is that intelligence expertise that processes the capabilities? We have to understand what’s actually happening in the space environment.” Read More
Deep Learning Explainability: Hints from Physics
Nowadays, artificial intelligence is present in almost every part of our lives. Smartphones, social media feeds, recommendation engines, online ad networks, and navigation tools are some examples of AI-based applications that already affect us every day. Deep learning in areas such as speech recognition, autonomous driving, machine translation, and visual object recognition has been systematically improving the state of the art for a while now.
However, the reasons that make deep neural networks (DNN) so powerful are only heuristically understood, i.e. we know only from experience that we can achieve excellent results by using large datasets and following specific training protocols. Recently, one possible explanation was proposed, based on a remarkable analogy between a physics-based conceptual framework called renormalization group (RG) and a type of neural network known as a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM). Read More
Sidewalk Labs, Waterfront Toronto to proceed with Quayside project, but with significant changes
Sidewalk Labs’ controversial proposal to build a high-tech district on Toronto’s waterfront is moving forward but major changes will be incorporated by Waterfront Toronto as it moves to assert more control over the project.
The development has been criticized by Ontario’s premier, privacy advocates and those suspicious of Big Tech.
In a significant climb down, Google sister firm Sidewalk Labs has agreed to a “realignment” of its original master plan, one that had called for broad development in Toronto’s Port Lands area and a public commitment from Waterfront Toronto to secure funding and deliver the extension of Light Rail Transit on the eastern waterfront. Read More
‘The data is my master.’
Tech triangles and AI ethics: Danit Gal on Chinese AI
Danit Gal is a former Yenching Scholar and coauthor of a recent paper, “Perspectives and Approaches to AI Ethics: East Asia.” On this episode, Gal discusses how Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese experts are forging new paths in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), exploring societal applications — and the unexpected drawbacks of “female” virtual assistants. Gal also explains the tech connections between China and Israel, and the possible impact of the U.S.-China trade war on this relationship. Read More
Perspectives and Approaches in AI Ethics: East Asia
This chapter introduces readers to distinct Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean perspectives on and approaches to AI and robots as tools and partners in the AI ethics debate. Little discussed and often ignored, this sensitive topic commands our attention as it continues to grow in local importance. Given East Asia’s influential position as a source of global inspiration, development, and supply of AI and robotics, we would do well to inform ourselves of what’s to come. Each country’s perspectives on and approaches to AI and robots on the tool-partner spectrum are evaluated by examining its policy, academic thought, local practices, and popular culture. This analysis places South Korea in the tool range, China in the middle of the spectrum, and Japan in the partner range. All three countries hold a salient tension between top-down tool approaches and bottom-up partner perspectives. This tension is likely to increase both in magnitude and importance and shape local and global development and regulation trajectories in the years to come. Read More
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI Ethics
Don’t Panic!
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI Ethics is a must read for anyone interested in the ethics of AI. The book is written in the style and spirit that has inspired many sci fi authors. The author’s goal was not only for a short, yet entertaining, but for an entire series.”
Sounds about right! Any guesses who wrote this raving review?
A machine learning algorithm. Read More —– (Part 2) (Part 3)
Intelligence community laying foundation for AI data analysis
Artificial intelligence is a concept that seems tailor-made for the intelligence community. The ability to sort through massive amounts of data, seeking out patterns large and small, anomalies that warrant further investigation, that’s what intelligence analysts do already. Imagine what they could achieve when augmented by AI?
But it’s not as simple as just adopting it. Dean Souleles, chief technology advisor for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said on Agency in Focus – Intelligence Community that the IC is working now to lay the foundation for adopting AI. Read More
5 Billion-dollar Industries That Will Be Changed By Artificial Intelligence
The future is one of my favorite things to think about. The future holds potential and possibility. The ability to think about the future, imagine the possibilities and take action in the present moment is what separates successful people from others.
In business, seeing the future can help you innovate and invest in that future. The apps and products that are popular right now were mostly started more than five years ago. There really aren’t many “overnight successes.” If you want to be successful in five years, you need to use your vision right now.
There’s no question that artificial intelligence (AI) will be widespread in five years. Yet we don’t know exactly what it will look like. Ask 27 experts how AI will change our lives, and you’ll get 27 different answers. Read More
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