The Challenge of Creating a Single Vision for AI Across All the World’s Borders
With so many cultural differences and competing motivations, how will we get the leaders of the world to agree on legal and ethical guidelines for artificial intelligence? Stanford HAI is hoping to spur those conversations.
Technology as powerful and diffuse as artificial intelligence will one day impact every part of the globe, and its inhabitants. While its development is still in relatively early stages, leaders gathered at Stanford University to share common ideals and competing views on why guiding the technology as it scales is as necessary as it is challenging.
The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence’s (HAI) 2019 Fall Conference on Ethics, Policy and Governance revealed what differentiates it from many other higher-education institutions: a steadfast focus on human-centric ideals and an open, interdisciplinary approach that equally values all fields, from the sciences to the arts. These tenets cropped up everywhere — from the questions the sessions tackled to the often-opposing panelists who shared the stage at Stanford’s Hoover Institution in late October.
HAI launched in March 2019 with a clear mission: to advance AI research, education, policy, and practice to improve the human condition. It educates and serves a global community by hosting stakeholders across academia, civil society, government, and industry to discuss how this technology can be guided to serve the common good. The leading minds gathered at HAI’s fall conference may have had different takes on what the future should look like and how we should get there, but they all agreed that global guidelines that uphold human rights and dignity are imperative.
The United States is currently crafting a national AI strategy, as have some 30 other nations. In a recent blog post, HAI co-directors Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy outlined why they believe the U.S. government should commit $120 billion in research, data and computing resources, education and startup capital over the next decade to support a bold American human-centered AI strategy to lead the world.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the audience that one key to preventing unintended harm by AI is to ensure that AI systems we collectively build always have human control. Photo by Ryan Zhang
The Defense Innovation Board chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt approved on October 31st a proposal guiding the ethical use of AI within the Department of Defense. That guidance is crucial to harnessing the power of AI. Within the next decade, Schmidt said, this nascent technology will help us build powerful new materials, understand the climate in new ways and generate far more efficient energy — it could even cure cancer.
“This is all good,” he said. “And I don’t want us, in these complicated debates about what we’re doing, to forget that the scientists here at Stanford and other places are making progress on problems which were thought to be unsolvable… because [without AI] they couldn’t do the math at scale.”
Schmidt shared the stage with Marietje Schaake, a HAI International Policy Fellow and Dutch former member of the European Parliament who worked to pass the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). She argued that AI’s potential shouldn’t obscure its potential harms, which the law can help mitigate. Large technology companies have a lot of power, Schaake said. “And with great power should come great responsibility, or at least modesty. Some of the outcomes of pattern recognition or machine learning are reason for such serious concerns that pauses are justified. I don’t think that everything that’s possible should also be put in the wild or into society as part of this often quoted ‘race for dominance.
