ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEEKS AN ETHICAL CONSCIENCE
Crawford’s good-humored talk featured nary an equation and took the form of an ethical wake-up call. She urged attendees to start considering, and finding ways to mitigate, accidental or intentional harms caused by their creations. “Amongst the very real excitement about what we can do there are also some really concerning problems arising,” Crawford said.
One such problem occurred in 2015, when Google’s photo service labeled some black people as gorillas. More recently, researchers found that image-processing algorithms both learned and amplified gender stereotypes. Crawford told the audience that more troubling errors are surely brewing behind closed doors, as companies and governments adopt machine learning in areas such as criminal justice, and finance. “The common examples I’m sharing today are just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. In addition to her Microsoft role, Crawford is also a cofounder of the AI Now Institute at NYU, which studies social implications of artificial intelligence.
On Thursday, Victoria Krakovna, a researcher from Alphabet’s DeepMind research group, is scheduled to give a talk on “AI safety,” a relatively new strand of work concerned with preventing software developing undesirable or surprising behaviors, such as trying to avoid being switched off.
Krakovna’s talk is part of a one-day workshop dedicated to techniques for peering inside machine-learning systems to understand how they work—making them “interpretable,” in the jargon of the field.
“A lot of decisions about the future of this field cannot be made in the disciplines in which it began,” says Terah Lyons, executive director of Partnership on AI, a nonprofit launched last year by tech companies to mull the societal impacts of AI. (The organization held a board meeting on the sidelines of NIPS this week.) She says companies, civic-society groups, citizens, and governments all need to engage with the issue.
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