Why Companies Need Their Own AI Code Of Conduct
Over the last year, I have been immersing myself in a lot of Artificial Intelligence research, including reading multiple books on AI and taking an online class from Stanford on the fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence.
FYI, this class was taught by an Adjunct Professor at Stanford, Andrew Ng, a co-founder of Coursera.org, and he has a new related class on Coursera entitled “Deep Learning with Andrew Ng.”
All of this study and research has given me a much better understanding of AI, what it can and can’t do, and its potential impact on our world. Although I am not an engineer and come from the marketing research side of the tech market, after nearly 40 years dealing with technology at all levels, my depth of understanding of technology and its impact on our world has always been present in my work and research.
AI has been around for decades but is even more prevalent in our tech world today. That is why I wanted and needed to delve deeper into AI at the design level to be more informed on how AI can and will impact our world.
One book, in particular, has been essential to my own understanding of AI from a global and political perspective, and it comes from author, Kai-Fu Lee, entitled, AI Super Powers; China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order.
One other country that comes into the AI global picture is Russia, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, has said on record that “the nation that leads in AI, will rule the world.”
During the Stanford class, Professor Ng touched on one topic of great interest to me, and that is ethics in AI. The more I have studied AI and Machine Learning, it has become apparent to me that AI can be used for good as well as evil. I believe that developing guidelines or principles for AI and ML in use by companies will become one of the most important initiatives companies of all nature have to put in place soon and live by in this next decade.
In an editorial recently for the Financial Times, CEO of Google and Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, said that he believes “AI must be regulated to prevent the potential consequences of tools including deep fakes and facial recognition.” ($)
His suggestions include “international alignment between the UK and the EU, agreement on “core values,” using open-source tools (such as those already being developed by Google) to test for adherence to written principles and using existing regulation, including Europe’s GDPR, to build out broader regulatory frameworks.
