Why you should worry about the ethics of artificial intelligence?

The discriminatory biases of the algorithms, the invasion of privacy, the risks of facial recognition and the regulation of human-machine relations are challenges that AI needs to face. However, the interests of governments and large companies often prevail over good practices.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a science fiction thing, it is everywhere. Your bank uses it to know if it is going to give you a credit or not and the ads you see on your social networks come out of a classification carried out by an algorithm, which has microsegmented and ‘decided’ if it shows you offers of wrinkle creams or high-end cars. Facial recognition systems, which use airports and security forces, are also based on this technology.

“The machines do not have a generalist intelligence, nor have we achieved that they have common sense, but they do have specific intelligences for very specific tasks, which exceed the efficiency of human intelligence,” explains Sinc Carles Sierra, director of the Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIIA) of the CSIC.

Therefore — he adds — “AI has enormous potential in the improvement of industrial processes, the design of new medicines or to achieve greater precision in medical diagnosis, to name a few examples.”

The data is the new oil But apart from a breakthrough, AI is now a huge business, estimated at about 190,000 million dollars (about 170,000 million euros) by 2025, including hardware, software and services around technology. The data is now considered as the new oil.

This very appetizing business is disputed, among others, by technology giants such as Amazon Google, Facebook, Microsoft and IBM, “whose commercial interests often prevail over ethical considerations,” says Sierra.

Many of these firms — he points out — “are now creating ethical committees in the field of AI, but they have done so more in a reactive than proactive way,” following criticism of the inappropriate use of AI in areas related to privacy. of users or use without proper supervision of some applications.

According to Sinc Carme Artigas, big data expert and ambassador in Spain of the Women in Data Science program at Stanford University, an example of these controversial uses was carried out by Microsoft when he decided to launch his Tay bot. This AI-based chatbot “was surfing on Twitter alone and after a few hours he began posting racist and misogynist tweets because he had taken the best of each house in this social network.” At 16 hours after launch, the firm had to deactivate it.

“What happens — says Artigas — is that when an artificial intelligence system is not supervised, there is a risk that there will be no filter, and that is what happened with this bot.

AI ethics is an issue that is now in an incipient phase of development and will have to face significant challenges. One of them, in the opinion of this expert, is what he calls the “dictatorship of algorithms.”

For example — he points out — the classification algorithms, what they do “is microsegmenting people, that is, classifying them by their behavior, which can lead, if not regulated or if the process is not transparent, to the end they limit people their options to choose freely. ”

“Imagine,” adds Artigas, “that an algorithm microsegments someone as a person of low average income, deduces that you will never be able to buy a Ferrari or a Porch and, therefore, in the ads you will never be shown a range car high because he knows he can’t afford it. This is an example that may seem unimportant, but we should ask ourselves if it is ethical not to present something to people even to dream because it has already been preclassified. ”

Another relevant issue that causes serious bias problems “is that, as machine learning algorithms are fed with historical data, we run the risk of perpetuating the prejudices of the past in the future.