Why You Need an AI Ethics Committee

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Reid Blackman: “…There are a lot of well-documented and highly publicized ethical risks associated with AI; unintended bias and invasions of privacy are just two of the most notable kinds. In many instances the risks are specific to particular uses, like the possibility that self-driving cars will run over pedestrians or that AI-generated social media newsfeeds will sow distrust of public institutions. In some cases they’re major reputational, regulatory, financial, and legal threats. Because AI is built to operate at scale, when a problem occurs, it affects all the people the technology engages with—for instance, everyone who responds to a job listing or applies for a mortgage at a bank. If companies don’t carefully address ethical issues in planning and executing AI projects, they can waste a lot of time and money developing software that is ultimately too risky to use or sell, as many have already learned.

Your organization’s AI strategy needs to take into account several questions: How might the AI we design, procure, and deploy pose ethical risks that cannot be avoided? How do we systematically and comprehensively identify and mitigate them? If we ignore them, how much time and labor would it take us to respond to a regulatory investigation? How large a fine might we pay if found guilty, let alone negligent, of violating regulations or laws? How much would we need to spend to rebuild consumer and public trust, provided that money could solve the problem?

The answers to those questions will underscore how much your organization needs an AI ethical risk program. It must start at the executive level and permeate your company’s ranks—and, ultimately, the technology itself. In this article I’ll focus on one crucial element of such a program—an AI ethical risk committee—and explain why it’s critical that it include ethicists, lawyers, technologists, business strategists, and bias scouts. Then I’ll explore what that committee requires to be effective at a large enterprise.

But first, to provide a sense of why such a committee is so important, I’ll take a deep dive into the issue of discriminatory AI. Keep in mind that this is just one of the risks AI presents; there are many others that also need to be investigated in a systematic way…(More)”.

How to get to the core of democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Toralf Stark, Norma Osterberg-Kaufmann and Christoph Mohamad-Klotzbach: “…Many criticisms of conceptions of democracy are directed more at the institutional design than at its normative underpinnings. These include such things as the concept of representativeness. We propose focussing more on the normative foundations assessed by the different institutional frameworks than discussing the institutional frameworks themselves. We develop a new concept, which we call the ‘core principle of democracy’. By doing so, we address the conceptual and methodological puzzles theoretically and empirically. Thus, we embrace a paradigm shift.

Collecting data is ultimately meaningless if we do not find ways to assess, summarise and theorise it. Kei Nishiyama argued we must ‘shift our attention away from the concept of democracy and towards concepts of democracy’. By the term concept we, in line with Nishiyama, are following Rawls. Rawls claimed that ‘the concept of democracy refers to a single, common principle that transcends differences and on which everyone agrees’. In contrast with this, ‘ideas of democracy (…) refer to different, sometimes contested ideas based on a common concept’. This is what Laurence Whitehead calls the ‘timeless essence of democracy’….

Democracy is a latent construct and, by nature, not directly observable. Nevertheless, we are searching for indicators and empirically observable characteristics we can assign to democratic conceptions. However, by focusing only on specific patterns of institutions, only sometimes derived from theoretical considerations, we block our view of its multiple meanings. Thus, we’ve no choice but to search behind the scenes for the underlying ‘core’ principle the institutions serve.

The singular core principle that all concepts of democracy seek to realise is political self-efficacy…(More)”.

Political self-efficacy
Source: authors’ own compilation

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Beyond the Hype

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

WEF Report: “Decentralized autonomous organizations are disrupting whole sectors. From finance to social networking to philanthropy, these code-driven, community-governed entities are changing the way we work. Yet these organizations also confront challenges of cybersecurity, governance, and regulatory uncertainty. The Crypto Impact and Sustainability Accelerator and Wharton Blockchain and Digital Asset Project have teamed up with an international group of crypto experts, civil society leaders, and builders to examine this nascent, but critical, emerging form…(More)”.

AI Can Predict Potential Nutrient Deficiencies from Space

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Rachel Berkowitz: “Micronutrient deficiencies afflict more than two billion people worldwide, including 340 million children. This lack of vitamins and minerals can have serious health consequences. But diagnosing deficiencies early enough for effective treatment requires expensive, time-consuming blood draws and laboratory tests.

New research provides a more efficient approach. Computer scientist Elizabeth Bondi and her colleagues at Harvard University used publicly available satellite data and artificial intelligence to reliably pinpoint geographical areas where populations are at high risk of micronutrient deficiencies. This analysis could potentially pave the way for early public health interventions.

Existing AI systems can use satellite data to predict localized food security issues, but they typically rely on directly observable features. For example, agricultural productivity can be estimated from views of vegetation. Micronutrient availability is harder to calculate. After seeing research showing that areas near forests tend to have better dietary diversity, Bondi and her colleagues were inspired to identify lesser-known markers for potential malnourishment. Their work shows that combining data such as vegetation cover, weather and water presence can suggest where populations will lack iron, vitamin B12 or vitamin A.

The team examined raw satellite measurements and consulted with local public health officials, then used AI to sift through the data and pinpoint key features. For instance, a food market, inferred based on roads and buildings visible, was vital for predicting a community’s risk level. The researchers then linked these features to specific nutrients lacking in four regions’ populations across Madagascar. They used real-world biomarker data (blood samples tested in labs) to train and test their AI program….(More)”.

10 learnings from considering AI Ethics through global perspectives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Sampriti Saxena and Stefaan G. Verhulst: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have the potential to solve the world’s biggest challenges. However, they also come with certain risks to individuals and groups. As these technologies become more prevalent around the world, we need to consider the ethical ramifications of AI use to identify and rectify potential harms. Equally, we need to consider the various associated issues from a global perspective, not assuming that a single approach will satisfy different cultural and societal expectations.

In February 2021, The Governance Lab (The GovLab), the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, the Global AI Ethics Consortium (GAIEC), the Center for Responsible AI @ NYU (R/AI), and the Technical University of Munich’s (TUM) Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (IEAI) launched AI Ethics: Global Perspectives. …A year and a half later, the course has grown to 38 modules, contributed by 40 faculty members representing over 20 countries. Our conversations with faculty members and our experiences with the course modules have yielded a wealth of knowledge about AI ethics. In keeping with the values of openness and transparency that underlie the course, we summarized these insights into ten learnings to share with a broader audience. In what follows, we outline our key lessons from experts around the world.

Our Ten Learnings:

  1. Broaden the Conversation
  2. The Public as a Stakeholder
  3. Centering Diversity and Inclusion in Ethics
  4. Building Effective Systems of Accountability
  5. Establishing Trust
  6. Ask the Right Questions
  7. The Role of Independent Research
  8. Humans at the Center
  9. Our Shared Responsibility
  10. The Challenge and Potential for a Global Framework…(More)”.

From Knowing to Doing: Operationalizing the 100 Questions for Air Quality Initiative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Jessica Seddon, Stefaan G. Verhulst and Aimee Maron: “…summarizes the September 2021 capstone event that wrapped up 100 Questions for Air Quality, led by GovLab and World Resources Institute (WR). This initiative brought together a group of 100 atmospheric scientists, policy experts, academics and data providers from around the world to identify the most important questions for setting a new, high-impact agenda for further investments in data and data science. After a thorough process of sourcing questions, clustering and ranking them – the public was asked to vote. The results were surprising: the most important question was not about what new data or research is needed, but on how we do more with what we already know to generate political will and investments in air quality solutions.

Co-hosted by Clean Air Fund, Climate and Clean Air Coalition, and Clean Air Catalyst, the 2021 roundtable discussion focused on an answer to that question. This conference proceeding summary reflects early findings from that session and offers a starting point for a much-needed conversation on data-to-action. The group of experts and practitioners from academia, businesses, foundations, government, multilateral organizations, nonprofits, and think tanks have not been identified so they could speak freely….(More)”.

The Behavioral Economics Guide 2022

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Editorial by Kathleen Vohs & Avni Shah: “This year’s Behavioral Economics Guide editorial reviews recent work in the areas of self-control and goals. To do so, we distilled the latest findings and advanced a set of guiding principles termed the FRESH framework: Fatigue, Reminders, Ease, Social influence, and Habits. Example findings reviewed include physicians giving out more prescriptions for opioids later in the workday compared to earlier (fatigue); the use of digital reminders to prompt people to re-engage with goals, such as for personal savings, from which they may have turned away (reminders); visual displays that give people data on their behavioral patterns so as to enable feedback and active monitoring (ease); the importance of geographically-local peers in changing behaviors such as residential water use (social influence); and digital and other tools that help people break the link between aspects of the environment and problematic behaviors (habits). We used the FRESH framework as a potential guide for thinking about the kinds of behaviors people can perform in achieving the goal of being environmental stewards of a more sustainable future…(More)”.

Technology is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stephanie Hare: “It seems that just about every new technology that we bring to bear on improving our lives brings with it some downside, side effect or unintended consequence.

These issues can pose very real and growing ethical problems for all of us. For example, automated facial recognition can make life easier and safer for us – but it also poses huge issues with regard to privacy, ownership of data and even identity theft. How do we understand and frame these debates, and work out strategies at personal and governmental levels?

Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics addresses one of today’s most pressing problems: how to create and use tools and technologies to maximize benefits and minimize harms? Drawing on the author’s experience as a technologist, political risk analyst and historian, the book offers a practical and cross-disciplinary approach that will inspire anyone creating, investing in or regulating technology, and it will empower all readers to better hold technology to account…(More)”.

Are blockchains decentralized?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Trail of Bits report: “Blockchains can help push the boundaries of current technology in useful ways. However, to make good risk decisions involving exciting and innovative technologies, people need demonstrable facts that are arrived at through reproducible methods and open data.

We believe the risks inherent in blockchains and cryptocurrencies have been poorly described and are often ignored—or even mocked—by those seeking to cash in on this decade’s gold rush.

In response to recent market turmoil and plummeting prices, proponents of cryptocurrency point to the technology’s fundamentals as sound. Are they?

Over the past year, Trail of Bits was engaged by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to examine the fundamental properties of blockchains and the cybersecurity risks associated with them. DARPA wanted to understand those security assumptions and determine to what degree blockchains are actually decentralized.

To answer DARPA’s question, Trail of Bits researchers performed analyses and meta-analyses of prior academic work and of real-world findings that had never before been aggregated, updating prior research with new data in some cases. They also did novel work, building new tools and pursuing original research.

The resulting report is a 30-thousand-foot view of what’s currently known about blockchain technology. Whether these findings affect financial markets is out of the scope of the report: our work at Trail of Bits is entirely about understanding and mitigating security risk.

The report also contains links to the substantial supporting and analytical materials. Our findings are reproducible, and our research is open-source and freely distributable. So you can dig in for yourself.

Key findings

  • Blockchain immutability can be broken not by exploiting cryptographic vulnerabilities, but instead by subverting the properties of a blockchain’s implementations, networking, and consensus protocols. We show that a subset of participants can garner undue, centralized control over the entire system:
    • While the encryption used within cryptocurrencies is for all intents and purposes secure, it does not guarantee security, as touted by proponents.
    • Bitcoin traffic is unencrypted; any third party on the network route between nodes (e.g., internet service providers, Wi-Fi access point operators, or governments) can observe and choose to drop any messages they wish.
    • Tor is now the largest network provider in Bitcoin; just about 55% of Bitcoin nodes were addressable only via Tor (as of March 2022). A malicious Tor exit node can modify or drop traffic….(More)”

Smartphone apps in the COVID-19 pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jay A. Pandit, Jennifer M. Radin, Giorgio Quer & Eric J. Topol: “At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, analog tools such as nasopharyngeal swabs for PCR tests were center stage and the major prevention tactics of masking and physical distancing were a throwback to the 1918 influenza pandemic. Overall, there has been scant regard for digital tools, particularly those based on smartphone apps, which is surprising given the ubiquity of smartphones across the globe. Smartphone apps, given accessibility in the time of physical distancing, were widely used for tracking, tracing and educating the public about COVID-19. Despite limitations, such as concerns around data privacy, data security, digital health illiteracy and structural inequities, there is ample evidence that apps are beneficial for understanding outbreak epidemiology, individual screening and contact tracing. While there were successes and failures in each category, outbreak epidemiology and individual screening were substantially enhanced by the reach of smartphone apps and accessory wearables. Continued use of apps within the digital infrastructure promises to provide an important tool for rigorous investigation of outcomes both in the ongoing outbreak and in future epidemics…(More)”.