Why the Future is Played Out | Sherman Alexie | Big Think

Why the Future is Played Out

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Joanna Bryson isn't a fan of companies that can't hold themselves responsible for their actions. Too many tech companies, she argues, think that they're above the law and that they should create what they want, no matter who it hurts, and have society pick up the pieces later. This libertarian attitude might be fine if the company happens to be a young startup. But if the company is a massive behemoth like Facebook that could easily manipulate 2 billion people worldwide — or influence an election, perhaps — perhaps there should be some oversight. Tech companies, she argues, could potentially create something catastrophic that they can't take back. And at the dawn of the AI era, where decisions made now could affect the future of mankind, regulation over these tech giants is needed now more than ever.

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JOANNA BRYSON:

Joanna Bryson is a Reader (tenured Associate Professor) at the University of Bath, and an affiliate of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). She has broad academic interests in the structure and utility of intelligence, both natural and artificial.  Venues for her research range from Reddit to Science. She is best known for her work in systems AI and AI ethics, both of which she began during her Ph.D. in the 1990s, but she and her colleagues publish broadly, in biology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, cognitive science, and politics.  Current projects include “The Limits of Transparency for Humanoid Robotics” funded by AXA Research, and “Public Goods and Artificial Intelligence” (with Alin Coman of Princeton University’s Department of Psychology and Mark Riedl of Georgia Tech) funded by Princeton’s University Center for Human Values.  Other current research includes understanding the causality behind the correlation between wealth inequality and political polarization, generating transparency for AI systems, and research on machine prejudice deriving from human semantics. She holds degrees in Psychology from Chicago and Edinburgh, and in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh and MIT.  At Bath, she founded the Intelligent Systems research group (one of four in the Department of Computer Science) and heads their Artificial Models of Natural Intelligence.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Joanna Bryson: If we're coding AI and we understand that there's moral consequences does that mean the programmer has to understand it? It isn't only the programmer, although we do really think that we need to train programmers to be watching out for these kinds of situations, knowing how to whistle blow, knowing when to whistle blow. There is a problem of people being over-reactive and that costs companies and I understand that, but we also have sort of a Nuremberg situation that we need everybody to be responsible. But ultimately it isn't just about the programmers, the programmers work within the context of a company and the companies work in the context of regulation and so it is about the law, it's about society. One of the things, one of the papers that had come out in 2017 was Professor Alan Winfield was a thing about how if legislatures can't be expected to keep up with the pace of technological change, what they could keep up with is which professional societies do they trust. And they already do this in various disciplines; it's just new for AI. You say you have to achieve the moral standards of at least one professional organization so when they give their rules about what's okay. And that sort of allows you kind of a loose coupling because it's wrong for professional organizations to enforce the law to go after people to sue them, whatever. That's not what professional organizations are for. But it's also sensible it is what professional organizations are for is to keep up with their own field and to set things like codes of conduct. So that's why you want to bring those two things together the executive government and the professional organizations and you can kind of have the legislature join those two together.

This is what I'm working hard to keep in the regulations that it's always people in organizations that are accountable and so then they will be motivated to make sure that they can demonstrate they followed due process, so both of the people who are operating the AI and the people who developed the AI. Because it's like a car, when there's a car accident normally the driver is at fault, someti...

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