Physicists Must Engage with AI Ethics, Now
These harmful impacts of AI have occurred, in part, because the rate of innovation has far outpaced the development of legislative oversight and because technology companies have been reluctant to (or have refused to) self-regulate. However, change may be coming. Activists and researchers are increasingly calling for governments to limit or outright ban certain technologies, many countries are developing standards for AI deployment, and technology companies large and small are creating or growing their ethics and fairness teams. Since I started attending AI conferences in 2016, I’ve seen the number of workshops, papers, and conversations around ethics in current AI grow. This year, the Neural Information Processing Systems meeting (NeurIPS)—one of the world’s largest AI research conferences—will require all submissions to include an impact statement discussing “ethical aspects and future societal consequences” and acknowledging potential conflicts of interest.
About half of the pre-conference courses and tutorials planned for this year’s March Meeting of the American Physical Society were focused on AI.
If you’re grappling with AI ethics for the first time (or even if you’ve thought about these issues many times before), I encourage you to start with readings from prominent scholars in the field. Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, the AI Now Institute at NYU, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute publish excellent research and host accessible, interdisciplinary conversations and events. If you can attend AI conferences like NeurIPS or the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), participate in sessions on AI ethics, data rights, and interpretability. Learn about ways AI is used in your local community and about the effects it’s having on those around you, particularly on vulnerable populations.
See the full story here: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v13/107