The Defense Innovation Board, a panel of 16 prominent technologists advising the Pentagon, today voted to approve AI ethics principles for the Department of Defense. The report includes 12 recommendations for how the U.S. military can apply ethics in the future for both combat and non-combat AI systems. The principles are broken into five main principles: responsible, equitable, traceable, reliable, and governable.
The principles state that humans should remain responsible for “developments, deployments, use and outcomes,” and AI systems used by the military should be free of bias that can lead to unintended human harm. Read More
Tag Archives: Ethics
The devil you know: trust in military applications of Artificial Intelligence
This article was submitted in response to the call for ideas issued by the co-chairs of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, Eric Schmidt and Robert Work. It is based on a chapter by the authors in the forthcoming book ‘AI at War’ and addresses the fifth question (part d.) which asks what measures the government should take to ensure AI systems for national security are trusted — by the public, end users, strategic decision-makers, and/or allies. Read More
AI Now Institute’s Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker Decode Live Interview
Making Algorithms Less Biased
For several years now, critics have raised questions about new risk assessments used to help judges decide whether defendants can be released from jail before trial. They have argued that the algorithms at the heart of those reviews too often end up introducing racial bias into what is supposed to be a more fair process.
The Center for Government Excellence on Monday released a toolkit designed to help local officials root out that kind of bias by improving the fairness and transparency of data science projects in their pipelines. Read More
AI pioneer: ‘The dangers of abuse are very real’
Yoshua Bengio is one of three computer scientists who last week shared the US$1-million A. M. Turing award — one of the field’s top prizes.
But alongside his research, Bengio, who is also scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), has raised concerns about the possible risks from misuse of technology. In December, he presented a set of ethical guidelines for AI called the Montreal declaration at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) meeting in the city. Read More
How AI companies can avoid ethics washing
One of the essential phrases necessary to understand AI in 2019 has to be “ethics washing.” Put simply, ethics washing — also called “ethics theater” — is the practice of fabricating or exaggerating a company’s interest in equitable AI systems that work for everyone. A textbook example for tech giants is when a company promotes “AI for good” initiatives with one hand while selling surveillance capitalism tech to governments and corporate customers with the other. Read More
Ethical Artificial Intelligence Becomes A Supreme Competitive Advantage
Ethical AI ensures more socially conscious approaches to customer and employee interactions, and in the long run, may be the ultimate competitive differentiatior as well, a recent survey suggests. Three in five consumers who perceive their AI interactions to be ethical place higher trust in the company, spread positive word of mouth, and are more loyal. More than half of consumers participating in a recent survey say they would purchase more from a company whose AI interactions are deemed ethical.
That’s the word coming out of a study of 1,580 executives and 4,400 consumers from the Capgemini Research Institute. As organizations progress to harness the benefits of AI, consumers, employees and citizens are watching closely and are ready to reward or punish behavior. Those surveyed said that they would be more loyal to, purchase more from, or be an advocate for organizations whose AI interactions are deemed ethical. Read More
Linking Artificial Intelligence Principles
Various Artificial Intelligence Principles are designed with different considerations, and none of them can be perfect and complete for every scenario. Linking Artificial Intelligence Principles (LAIP)is an initiative and platform for synthesizing, linking, and analyzing various Artificial Intelligence Principles World Wide, from different research institutes, non-profit organizations, non-governmental organizations, companies, etc. The efforts aim at understanding in which degree do these different AI Principles proposals share common values, differ and complete each other. Read More
AI Ethics at War – When AI Governance Shifts from Cooperation to Competition
Today, the world of AI ethics is a harmonious ecosystem of organizations with uncontroversial and reasonable, respectable aims.
They share conferences, include each other in thought leadership, and develop white papers together – in order to discover frameworks for governing AI and handling issues around privacy, security, bias, and individual rights.
This makes sense, for now – because AI ethics is a means to great power. Read More
Tech companies are enabling a “machine of deportation” say leading immigrant rights advocates
In the past year, many major tech companies such as Amazon, Palantir, Salesforce, and Microsoft have come under scrutiny for selling software to US federal immigration agencies. That’s because those agencies have been responsible for enforcing some of the controversial immigration policies that separate families at the border, detain children, and deport people seeking refuge back to dangerous places.
Jonathan Ryan, CEO of immigrant legal aid and services organization RAICES, and Erika Andiola, the organization’s chief advocacy officer, are making the case that tech companies need to realize the moral consequences of the industry’s complicity — and their ability to stop what many view is blatantly unethical treatment of refugees. Read More
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