For all the money AI has made for big companies like Google and Facebook, this year companies have woken up to some of the pitfalls of the technology: It can easily become biased, there’s no set code of ethics for the technology, and putting research into the real world too soon can cost lives.
For all the money AI has made for big companies like Google $GOOGL and Facebook $META, this year companies have woken up to some of the pitfalls of the technology: It can easily become biased, there’s no set code of ethics for the technology, and putting research into the real world too soon can cost lives.
While much of this catalyzed around Uber $UBER’s self-driving car fatality, when a research vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in March, research showing racial and gender disparities in facial recognition, as well as reports highlighting the potential misuses of artificial intelligence have also brought new attention to the issues.
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Here are a few of the key events in 2018 highlighting the problems with modern AI:
The AI industry is still booming in Silicon Valley and beyond, but 2018 was a turning point where lawmakers and industry groups started ask less about “the singularity” and Terminator doomsday scenarios, and instead realized the potential harms that careless AI implementation could wreak in government and the private sector. This means that instead of the mentality of quickly turning AI research into AI products may well be met with greater resistance in the future, as the public has a greater understanding of AI’s potential shortcomings due to bias or a lack of ethical design.
Rumman Chowdhury, Accenture $ACN’s lead for responsible AI, told Quartz that this change is happening in industry as well—it’s just another part of a company’s business plan.
“We were finding that 25% of companies were having to do a complete overhaul of their system at least once a month because of inconsistent outcomes or bias, or they were just unsure. I’m calling that ethical debt,” she said. “If you don’t build ethics in from the ground up, it’s just like cybersecurity, you’re going to spend time later trying to patch up a fix. It’s much easier to do the work up front.”
