Why AI Ethics Is Even More Important Now
Contract-tracing apps are fueling more AI ethics discussions, particularly around privacy. The longer term challenge is approaching AI ethics holistically.
If your organization is implementing or thinking of implementing a contact-tracing app, it’s wise to consider more than just workforce safety. Failing to do so could expose your company other risks such as employment-related lawsuits and compliance issues. More fundamentally, companies should be thinking about the ethical implications of their AI use.
Contact-tracing apps are raising a lot of questions. For example, should employers be able to use them? If so, must employees opt-in or can employers make them mandatory? Should employers be able to monitor their employees during off hours? Have employees been given adequate notice about the company’s use of contact tracing, where their data will be stored, for how long and how the data will be used? Enterprises need to think through these questions and others because the legal ramifications alone are complex.
Contact-tracing apps are underscoring the fact that ethics should not be divorced from technology implementations and that employers should think carefully about what they can, cannot, should and should not do.
“It’s easy to use AI to identify people with a high likelihood of the virus. We can do this, not necessarily well, but we can use image recognition, cough recognition using someone’s digital signature and track whether you’ve been in close proximity with other people who have the virus,” said Kjell Carlsson, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “It’s just a hop, skip and a jump away to identify people who have the virus and mak[e] that available. There’s a myriad of ethical issues.”
The larger issue is that companies need to think about how AI could impact stakeholders, some of which they may not have considered.
“I’m a big advocate and believer in this whole stakeholder capital idea. In general, people need to serve not just their investors but society, their employees, consumers and the environment and I think to me that’s a really compelling agenda,” said Nigel Duffy, global artificial intelligence leader at professional services firm EY. “Ethical AI is new enough that we can take a leadership role in terms of making sure we’re engaging that whole set of stakeholders.”
Organizations have a lot of maturing to do
AI ethics is following a trajectory that’s akin to security and privacy. First, people wonder why their companies should care. Then, when the issue becomes obvious, they want to know how to implement it. Eventually, it becomes a brand issue.
“If you look at the large-scale adoption of AI, it’s in very early stages and if you ask most corporate compliance folks or corporate governance folks where does [AI ethics] sit on their list of risks, it’s probably not in their top three,” said EY’s Duffy. “Part of the reason for this is there’s no way to quantify the risk today, so I think we’re pretty early in the execution of that.”
Some organizations are approaching AI ethics from a compliance point of view, but that approach fails to address the scope of the problem.
