Ethics & AI: Privacy & the Future of Work

I think ethics becomes more important as something becomes more impactful, and as AI becomes more impactful, the more that we have to think about the ethics of AI. Artificial intelligence is ultimately built by human beings. Human beings can have very diverse motives for why they make something. Unfortunately, there's a huge difference between those that are involved in creating these systems, and those that are impacted by these systems. So what we really want to think about long term, is where is the society we want to get to, and how is technology going to help enable that? If we think about that in the long term, we have a better chance of getting there, than if we just try to develop the technology and then see what happens. I have always been extremely inspired by the opportunity that robotics presents, to enable us to do work that was too dangerous for humans, not possible for humans, or is done more effectively by a machine. There have been millions of jobs that have really transformed because of the introduction of robots or AI, and that will continue to be the case. As a result of that, when we design algorithms that are meant to replace people, we need to be attentive of how we do that and how we design those systems, so that it respects those people and treats them with dignity. When we think about artificial intelligence, we always put people first - we always think about who is that worker who's trying to get a job done? How can our technology help them? What do we do in the long term? How do we retrain them for another job or another career? As human beings, with all of our creativity and passion, we're going to continue to learn how to cooperate with artificial intelligence, and have new jobs, have new job descriptions. It is really important that technologists have this mantra of ensuring that their innovation is ethical, and is beneficial to everyone in society. Machine learning requires a lot of true information to be provided to it, in order to ultimately deliver a utility. This information might be very sensitive to us. It might be health related, it might be financial. It might be very very personal. We need to put checks and controls in place like with any technology that it's utilized to benefit us, and that it is done with accordance to the law. There's a lot to gain from involving yourself, and really understanding the details of how this technology works. Given that it's so impactful, given that it is something that will influence your life and the life of everyone that you love. AI is really at this kind of early stage, that has this huge potential to do good. If you're young right now and you learn this stuff now, you could really end up being at the crest of a wave of something that's really important.