Ethics & AI: Equal Access and Algorithmic Bias

No matter what field you end up going into, it's quite likely that AI is going to  have some impact on what you're doing. The potential for AI to help society is enormous! It's something that is influencing a lot of very important decisions about  real humans and their lives. It could be used in education, to be more of an  equalizer between people. It could be used in healthcare to develop new drugs. It could be  used in science to develop new technologies. Like any technology its application  will depend on how it is utilized. At the same time, we need to think about  the risks that are associated with doing that. The consequences are huge! The kind  of artificial intelligence technology that really dominates the applications  we're seeing today is machine learning. Machine learning depends entirely  on the information that you feed it. The problem is that with real world data, there's  often information in there that you didn't intend to be in there, but is captured because of  the bias in the data collection process. So if you're building an AI to  determine who gets a home loan, or who should be charged with  a crime, it could definitely bubble up the racial biases that humans  and our current society already does. A lot of what it means to build less harmful  AI is really systems that are including the perspectives of those that are most vulnerable  or most marginalized, most likely to be hurt by the deployment of that system. In many  ways I've worried that the people who are particularly vulnerable to AI are the people who  are already underprivileged in many respects. Most people in the world  just have AI applied to them, rather than playing an active role  in guiding what AI gets applied to. Everybody you know has a computer in their pocket.  That's young people, old people, rich people, poor people. To me, that's actually quite exciting  from a democratization of technology perspective. It means that AI, powerful as it is, could theoretically be in everybody's  pockets, benefiting everybody. We should strive to make sure that things that provide  value for society can be reached to anybody. How do we give a greater voice to the  people who are being impacted by AI, to in turn be able to turn around  and impact how AI is used for them? Every time when you're looking at a new problem,  you have an opportunity to change the world. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes  we don't, but we always try. It's really critically important that we have  as many diverse perspectives as possible, influencing the development of AI. We need the participation of  more women, more people of color, to provide a different perspective and a different  lens on which problems matter and how we should approach these problems.