What Does an AI Ethicist Do?

Microsoft was one of the earliest companies to begin discussing and advocating for an ethical perspective on artificial intelligence. The issue began to take off at the company in 2016, when CEO Satya Nadella spoke at a developer conference about how the company viewed some of the ethical issues around AI, and later that year published an article about these issues. Nadella’s primary focus was on Microsoft’s orientation toward using AI to augment human capabilities and building trust into intelligent products. The next year, Microsoft’s R&D head Eric Horvitz partnered with Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer Brad Smith to form Aether, a cross-functional committee addressing AI and ethics in engineering and research.

With these foundations laid, in 2018, Microsoft established a full-time position in AI policy and ethics. Tim O’Brien, who has been with Microsoft for 15 years as a general manager, first in platform strategy and then global communications, took on the role.

Of course, many organizations are increasingly paying attention to ethical issues around AI. In a 2018 Deloitte survey, 32% of AI-aware executives ranked the ethical risks of AI as one of their top three AI-related concerns. Microsoft and O’Brien are essentially bellwethers on this issue — the figurative sheep at the head of the flock — in creating a role focused on, as O’Brien puts it, AI ethics “advocacy and evangelism.”

I talked with O’Brien to find out how his role came about, what he does in it, and what kinds of policies might emerge at Microsoft because of his work. I also asked him how the AI ethicist role might relate to similar positions at other companies.

O’Brien told me that he was inspired by the early steps Microsoft’s leaders had taken on AI ethics, and that he asked to pursue the topic for the company as his primary job. He’d been a product marketer for various tech companies early in his career and spent much of the last 15 years at Microsoft pitching developers on why they should build stuff on the company’s platforms.

I asked O’Brien if he was hiding a philosophy or theology degree on his LinkedIn profile, but he laughingly said no. He said he did have some exposure to ethics issues in his business law classes as an MBA student and that he went to a Jesuit high school — a Catholic order known for its focus on ethics and philosophy. That’s it, though, for his formal educational preparation in ethics.

His interest developed when was running Microsoft’s Global Communications function outside the U.S., a role that had him traveling constantly and frequently exposed to the “geopolitics of technology,” as he put it. He began to realize, he said, that leaving all of businesses’ ethical and policy issues to the lawyers was not sufficient. O’Brien was seeing that, as data and processing move to the cloud, technology, policy, and geography issues all were starting to collide.

O’Brien was quick to point out that he’s standing on the shoulders of giants. “Most of the ideas I talk about are not mine,” he said. He mentioned that Microsoft president Smith has been preaching the AI ethics gospel for several years now, and indeed Smith speaks and writes regularly about the need to consider the ethical, social, and political aspects of the technology. O’Brien sees part of his role as helping to disseminate Smith’s ideas at scale — Smith is a powerful steward for responsible AI at Microsoft, but he’s a busy guy. And the ethical issues around AI are sufficiently complex and nuanced that Smith can’t campaign for them all.

O’Brien’s job began in May 2018, and he began traveling around the world almost immediately. His primary activities have included giving speeches at conferences, meeting with Microsoft customers, leading a research effort, talking with analysts and researchers, and coordinating activity across Microsoft.

O’Brien’s presentations have focused on topics such as avoiding algorithmic bias and creating transparency in AI models.