Phaedra Boinodiris talked with us today as part of our Nexter Chats. She is an entrepreneur, author, gaming aficionado and seriously a great presenter! In talking about AI & Ethics today she shared some interesting examples of bias in a number of different industries and situations (credit, precision medicine, finding potholes) and emphasized the need to raise awareness of the possible bias in using AI, the fact that AI can be used to manipulate how we see the world. Check out Google’s AI Explorables: “posted explanations of two fundamental concepts—Hidden Bias and Measuring Fairness. But in the coming months, the tech giant plans on posting more ‘Explorables’ on other fairness issues such as the effect of feedback loops on the biases of the AI system. Interpretability, which answers the logical steps taken by a system to reach a specific point, will be covered too along with the issue of privacy and what it means in the context of an AI system.” Lots of other resources were mentioned and shared by our audience as well as our speaker.

Sources Recommended on AI developments regarding ethics:

IBM’s Advancing AI Ethics 

IBM.biz/everydayethics

designethically.com

https://www.ibm.com/watson/assets/duo/pdf/everydayethics.pdf

Safiye Noble’s book “Algorithms of Oppression”

Groups working with, influencing and focused on educating governments:

An interesting program from GM to work with teachers  introduces the concepts of AI and ethics as early as K-12 so we have an informed public. A number of organizations like IBM and Salesforce have responsible AI groups but many more are needed to build awareness, illustrate transparency so that individuals know when a decision about them is being made by a computer, create diverse governance and standards, watch for unintended consequences, etc. In the US there is no longer an Office of Technical Assessment who can inform Congress about emerging technology. More than 30 bills about AI have been introduced to Congress, none have passed.

Interesting, this just in from TechCrunch yesterday, IBM ends all facial recognition business as CEO calls out bias and inequality. “IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced today that the company would no longer sell facial recognition services, calling for a ‘national dialogue’ on whether it should be used at all. He also voiced support for a new bill aiming to reduce police violence and increase accountability.”  And from TechRepublic: How to get free AI training and tools. “Even if you don’t have a large training budget, you can still democratize your AI. Here are ways to get the AI training and resources your staff needs.”