philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

9Apr/19Off

AI systems should be accountable, explainable, and unbiased, says EU

Screen_Shot_2019_04_08_at_1.36.11_PM.0.pngTo help with this goal, the EU convened a group of 52 experts who came up with seven requirements they think future AI systems should meet. They are as follows:

  • Human agency and oversight — AI should not trample on human autonomy. People should not be manipulated or coerced by AI systems, and humans should be able to intervene or oversee every decision that the software makes.
  • Technical robustness and safety — AI should be secure and accurate. It shouldn’t be easily compromised by external attacks (such as adversarial examples), and it should be reasonably reliable.
  • Privacy and data governance — Personal data collected by AI systems should be secure and private. It shouldn’t be accessible to just anyone, and it shouldn’t be easily stolen.
  • Transparency — Data and algorithms used to create an AI system should be accessible, and the decisions made by the software should be “understood and traced by human beings.” In other words, operators should be able to explain the decisions their AI systems make.
  • Diversity, non-discrimination, and fairness — Services provided by AI should be available to all, regardless of age, gender, race, or other characteristics. Similarly, systems should not be biased along these lines.
  • Environmental and societal well-being — AI systems should be sustainable (i.e., they should be ecologically responsible) and “enhance positive social change”
  • Accountability — AI systems should be auditable and covered by existing protections for corporate whistleblowers. Negative impacts of systems should be acknowledged and reported in advance.

You’ll notice that some of these requirements are pretty abstract and would be hard to assess in an objective sense. (Definitions of “positive social change,” for example, vary hugely from person to person and country to country.) But others are more straightforward and could be tested via government oversight. Sharing the data used to train government AI systems, for example, could be a good way to fight against biased algorithms.

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But this role has been partly forced on the EU by circumstance. It can’t compete with America and China — the world’s leaders in AI — when it comes to investment and cutting-edge research, so it’s chosen ethics as its best bet to shape the technology’s future.

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