Tag Archives: Ethics
If Your Company Uses AI, It Needs an Institutional Review Board
Conversations around AI and ethics may have started as a preoccupation of activists and academics, but now — prompted by the increasing frequency of headlines of biased algorithms, black box models, and privacy violations — boards, C-suites, and data and AI leaders have realized it’s an issue for which they need a strategic approach.
A solution is hiding in plain sight. Other industries have already found ways to deal with complex ethical quandaries quickly, effectively, and in a way that can be easily replicated. Instead of trying to reinvent this process, companies need to adopt and customize one of health care’s greatest inventions: the Institutional Review Board, or IRB. Read More
How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation
The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem.
It was March 23, 2018, just days after the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy that worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign, had surreptitiously siphoned the personal data of tens of millions of Americans from their Facebook accounts in an attempt to influence how they voted. It was the biggest privacy breach in Facebook’s history. …The Cambridge Analytica scandal would kick off Facebook’s largest publicity crisis ever. Read More
Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?
At artificial-intelligence conferences, researchers are increasingly alarmed by what they see.
In computer science, the main outlets for peer-reviewed research are not journals but conferences, where accepted papers are presented in the form of talks or posters. In June, 2019, at a large artificial-intelligence conference in Long Beach, California, called Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, I stopped to look at a poster for a project called Speech2Face. Using machine learning, researchers had developed an algorithm that generated images of faces from recordings of speech. A neat idea, I thought, but one with unimpressive results: at best, the faces matched the speakers’ sex, age, and ethnicity—attributes that a casual listener might guess. That December, I saw a similar poster at another large A.I. conference, Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), in Vancouver, Canada. I didn’t pay it much mind, either. Read More
Should a self-driving car kill the baby or the grandma? Depends on where you’re from.
The infamous “trolley problem” was put to millions of people in a global study, revealing how much ethics diverge across cultures.
In 2014 researchers at the MIT Media Lab designed an experiment called Moral Machine. The idea was to create a game-like platform that would crowdsource people’s decisions on how self-driving cars should prioritize lives in different variations of the “trolley problem.” In the process, the data generated would provide insight into the collective ethical priorities of different cultures.
… A new paper published in Nature presents the analysis of that data and reveals how much cross-cultural ethics diverge on the basis of culture, economics, and geographic location. Read More
Getting the Future Right: Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Rights
Developments in AI have received wide attention by the media, civil society, academia, human rights bodies and policymakers. Much of that attention focuses on its potential to support economic growth. How different technologies can affect fundamental rights has received less attention. To date, we do not yet have a large body of empirical evidence about the wide range of rights AI implicates, or about the safeguards needed to ensure that the use of AI complies with fundamental rights in practice.
On 19 February 2020, the European Commission published a White Paper on Artificial Intelligence – A European approach to excellence and trust. It outlines the main principles of a future EU regulatory framework for AI in Europe. The White Paper notes that it is vital that such a framework is grounded in the EU’s fundamental values, including respect for human rights – Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU).
This report supports that goal by analysing fundamental rights implications when using artificial intelligence. Based on concrete ‘use cases’ of AI in selected areas, it focuses on the situation on the ground in terms of fundamental rights challenges and opportunities when using AI. Read More
Ethical AI isn’t the same as trustworthy AI, and that matters
Artificial intelligence (AI) solutions are facing increased scrutiny due to their aptitude for amplifying both good and bad decisions. More specifically, for their propensity to expose and heighten existing societal biases and inequalities. It is only right, then, that discussions of ethics are taking center stage as AI adoption increases.
In lockstep with ethics comes the topic of trust. Ethics are the guiding rules for the decisions we make and actions we take. These rules of conduct reflect our core beliefs about what is right and fair. Trust, on the other hand, reflects our belief that another person — or company — is reliable, has integrity and will behave in the manner we expect. Ethics and trust are discrete, but often mutually reinforcing, concepts.
So is an ethical AI solution inherently trustworthy? Read More
Nothing to be ashamed of: sex robots for older adults with disabilities
This paper spotlights ways in which sexual capacities relate to central human capabilities, such as the ability to generate a personally meaningful story of one’s life; be physically, mentally and emotionally healthy; experience bodily integrity; affiliate and bond with others; feel and express a range of human emotions; and choose a plan of life. It sets forth a dignity-based argument for affording older people access to sex robots as part of reasonable efforts to support their central human capabilities at a floor level. The argument develops stepwise: (1) first, I dispel ageism and negative stereotypes about later-life sexuality, showing their deep historical roots in medicine and science; (2) second, I set forth a positive argument, grounded in capability accounts of justice, for deploying sex robots for older people with disabilities; (3) finally, after responding to objections, I conclude that sex robots are a reasonable way to support later-life sexuality for persons with disabilities. While often depicted as a product for younger, able-bodied people, this paper is a bid for reimagining sex robots as a product for older, disabled people. Read More
For under $40, you can learn all about Python, machine learning and artificial intelligence
This week in thinking machines news, a Harvard professor and his students have now raised $14 million to create artificial intelligence so smart that even hackers can’t crack it. Meanwhile, reports from the White House suggest the federal government is close to issuing their directives on how agencies should regulate AI going forward.
And if story no. 1 makes you at all dubious about the impact of story no. 2…well, welcome to the amazing world of Python, machine learning and the tech wonders and ethical quandaries of creating human-based artificial life. Read More
Why kids need special protection from AI’s influence
Algorithms are increasingly shaping children’s lives, but new guardrails could prevent them from getting hurt.
Algorithms can change the course of children’s lives. Kids are interacting with Alexas that can record their voice data and influence their speech and social development. They’re binging videos on TikTok and YouTube pushed to them by recommendation systems that end up shaping their worldviews.
… Children are often at the forefront when it comes to using and being used by AI, and that can leave them in a position to get hurt. … The Unicef guidelines are meant to complement existing themes and tailor them to children. Read More
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