Towards a Responsible and Ethical AI
It is not the technology at fault, but the intention.
Responsible AI, Ethical AI, AI for social good — I am sure you must have heard these terms at some point or the other, whether you are a Data Scientist or not.
When I first heard these terms, the warning from Prof Stephen Hawking rang in my ears:
And there my journey of understanding this critical aspect of the AI foundation started. I used to wonder how to relate ethics with AI which is just a series of algorithms, when, in fact, we have not been able to apply ethical behavior among ourselves.
As per the AI index report published by the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered AI, cybersecurity and regulatory compliance are among the top risks identified by AI/ML-oriented organizations.
Another report reveals how AI has captured interest among undergraduate students.
Now, let us come to the topic of our discussion today, ethics in AI. The sheer exponential increase in the number of papers presented in the conferences talking about ethics over the last five years, speaks volumes about its importance.
The applications of AI reside in almost every walk of our life. A look at our phone and the magic starts to happen right away in the form of facial recognition, as we unlock our phone. We see a lot of recommendations fed to us, right from the newsfeed, videos, music, the products we buy at e-commerce websites to the auto-completion suggestions of the words we type while chatting on messengers or writing that email draft.
You do not want to type any query — don’t worry. There are multiple digital voice assistants, Siri, Alexa, Ok Google at your service.
These are just some of the examples of how we are surrounded by AI everywhere.
It might appear that AI has made our lives easier. It has indeed. But like two sides of the coin, the opinion about how AI is traversing its way into our lives needs an unbiased look from ‘the other side’.
Let’s watch this video and we will talk further on how the other side looks like:
Ignore the brand behind the video and share how do you feel if you were Felix. Do you feel comfortable being tracked right at the moment you make a coffee transaction from the time you board the cab to the use of GPS which tells the organization recording your data about where you go, what routine you follow? Does it end here? NO.
It goes on to knowing whom you meet, what you talk about, where is your next possible destination, which brand’s gadget you should buy, what beliefs you carry, what is your family composition, your ethnicity, culture, and a lot of other things that would make you uncomfortable as Felix became at the end of the video.
