\u201cDuring her Reputation tour Taylor Swift hired a security company to set up a kiosk that played her concert and exclusive rehearsal footage. They covertly installed the kiosk with cameras, with facial recognition technology for the purpose of luring any of Swift\u2019s hundreds of known stalkers. That way they could identify and apprehend them. That example raised a lot of questions about ethical use of technology for me.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This example was shared by\u00a0Rebekah Tweed<\/a>, program director for\u00a0All Tech is Human<\/a>, during \u201cThe Human Side of AI\u201d live panel discussion held last week. In this edition,\u00a0Nesma Bensalem<\/a>, founder of\u00a0WeCare Impact<\/a>, moderated the discussion and helped the panel to explore the importance of Ethics and Diversity in AI. Alongside Rebekah were\u00a0Kara Howard,<\/a>\u00a0Founder of\u00a0The KI<\/a>,\u00a0Bridget Greenwood<\/a>, founder of\u00a0The Bigger Pie<\/a>, and\u00a0Ruben Daniels<\/a>, founder of\u00a0Memri<\/a>. Together the five of them explored why Ethics and Diversity in AI is important, and what impact it has on the technology that is being built. Rebekah captured it perfectly when she asked: \u201cDo we as a society even have a chance to have these conversations and to have a say in the technology that is affecting our daily lives?\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIs it okay to capture biometric data about thousands of people without their consent or even their knowledge?\u201d asked Rebekah. \u201cIs it relevant that it’s for the safety of a single person? How much of our privacy are we willing to trade for safety?\u201d Those questions are rarely answered, but most times they aren\u2019t even asked. We need to be asking the right questions about the technology we are building.. Rebekah reminds us about the deeper impact of these issues, especially regarding bias and fairness in automated decision-making tools. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The road to AI is being paved by corporations that are doing live research on humans. There\u2019s little transparency and even less explainability on how the algorithms work and what goal they are trying to achieve. . In fact, how they work is not even known to the engineers who build it themselves, making it hard to say who\u2019s responsible for their impact. This can become problematic real quick if your self-driving car decides to hit the brake for no reason. Or when the model that identified eligible candidates for kidney transplants turned out to have a racial-bias. It can have a huge impact on people\u2019s lives. But how do you make sure these things don\u2019t happen? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bridget Greenwood offered some more insights on the topic. \u201cThe speed at which these things are developing is making it really hard for regulators to keep up. There are concerns about EU regulations coming up that potentially will be a bit too stifling for innovation here, but then again, if you look towards China, where the government just decides what the rules are, they still find ways to be innovative. It\u2019s just a different way of dealing with regulations. The same goes for the US, where it\u2019s organized differently again.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bridget highlighted what she thinks will be vital for any solution to be successful: \u201cThere needs to be a profitable angle for businesses to make sure that they are ethically AI. So that could be in terms of the longevity of the user, because the experience of it is actually making them better as opposed to, for example, TikTok that is creating a generation of teenagers with terrible mental health issues. I keep asking myself, is that really the best profitable business model that we can do? Can\u2019t we do better?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ruben Daniels, founder of Memri,, has been asking similar questions in the past and believes it should be possible to do better. \u201cOur journey really started with realizing that data privacy was an issue and it took us a while to figure out that actually it’s more about the control of your own data because it’s controlling what you see and spend your attention on. In that way it has a major impact on how you spend your life. What you take in, what emotions come out of that, the relationships you build and your view in the world\u2026 and being able to have some control over that is so important.\u201d While looking for how to give their users that agency, Memri realized they needed to change things at a fundamental level just as much as on a technological level. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ruben: \u201cWe studied how others in the world have organized themselves by giving all stakeholders a voice and how to do that on a community level, figuring out how to be a leader in that context. And for me personally that has been a real growth journey on figuring out how to be present, provide leadership within certain roles and allow others to fill in their space themselves. And so we have spent a lot of time on that and we turned out to create a cooperative legal structure, a multi-stakeholder cooperative legal structure, getting all those voices involved as we’re thinking about building out this AI ecosystem. We don’t want to be the ones that are essentially specifying how the world should work. Instead, we\u2019re inviting communities that would want to shape that world to imagine it together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Kara Howard, actively putting in effort to hear alternative voices and wanting to have diverse voices is a must. \u201cI remember reading a piece in Vanity Fair that was an interview with Elon Musk. He had just initiated his non-profit around the ethics of AI and there was this visual image of all the key futurists in the AI space and technology space and their perspective about the future of AI, and whether they think it will be something scary or not, and it really stuck out to me because there was close to 15 images and there wasn’t one woman listed.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Kara found a great opportunity in realizing the potential dangers of it. Enough to initiate a community called the Feminine Intelligence where they connected futurists, thought leaders and many others to broaden the perspectives and the voices out there on a meta-level, making sure that those under-represented can find their route to influencing how the future of technology will look like. \u201cOrganizations, such as Memri, that want to tap into communities and be a part of the conversations happening will probably start forming ecosystems where experts and thought leaders provide guidance for founders by suggesting tooling or methods and helping them tailor it to their needs.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Plenty more subjects were touched up on, a lot more insights were provided, and many more questions from the audience were answered, but it was clear to all that \u2026 \u201cAI, Ethics and Diversity requires much more discussion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n