Executive Briefing: Ethical considerations for AI

Description

The use of AI is growing rapidly and expanding into applications that impact people’s lives. Autonomous vehicles must make instant decisions with multiple outcomes, and AI is already being used in judiciary systems to help make sentencing decisions. While researchers are driven by enthusiasm to harness the power of AI, they also have an obligation to consider the impact of intelligent applications.

This is a question of trust and ethics, not just technology. While we may believe that machines don’t make value judgments and are inherently unbiased, assumptions made in the design process can be based on subjective value judgments, such as choosing datasets, selecting weighting schemes, balancing precision, and recall. As people increasingly put their trust in technology, without really understanding how it works or its limitations, stronger ethics are essential. Raj Minhas explores how PARC leads an industry initiative to build an ethical framework into the research and design of decision-making processes in AI and intelligent systems.