AI Ethics Weekly – August 2: Uses of AI We Can All Get Behind

AI Ethics Weekly – August 2: Uses of AI We Can All Get Behind
August 2, 2020 LH3_Admin

Despite all the hype AI has not been the savior we had all hoped for but there is some cause for optimism.

Drinking

With a formidable resurgence in JapanState Of Disaster declared in Australia, and the United States leading the world in the number of deaths, it’s clear that COVID-19 is not done with us yet.

Please stay safe and healthy!

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All hype and no game

Here’s why AI didn’t save us from COVID-19
Dean Kawamura @El_Deano
Despite playing home to nearly all of the world’s largest technology companies, the US has become the epicenter of the outbreak. Other nations with advanced AI programs aren’t necessarily fairing much better.

Facial recognition as the Manhattan Project of our time
“Legal liability is clearer: you can delve into existing legislation and see if it is being violated. Moral responsibility is much more arbitrary and also easier to circumvent. At least until your conscience gets in the way.”

GPT-3: an AI game-changer or an environmental disaster?
Which raises another question: given that this kind of incremental improvement is made possible only by applying more and more

computing power to the problem, what are the environmental costs of machine-learning technology?

Rite Aid deployed facial recognition system in hundreds of US stores
h/t Doomscrolling Eternal @hypervisible
Over about eight years, the American drugstore chain Rite Aid Corp quietly added facial recognition systems to 200 stores across the United States, in one of the largest rollouts of such technology among retailers in the country, a Reuters investigation found.

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Philosophizing about AI Ethics

Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai agrees that it is imperative to embed ethics into AI
h/t Gisele Waters
Pichai was alluding to how AI has already impacted production and given corporations a glimpse of its upside potential to drive economic growth to dizzying new heights.  Google’s CEO said it was vital to keep bias out of AI implementations.

Philosophers On GPT-3
h/t Abeba Birhane @Abebab
By drawing on their respective research interests in the philosophy of mind, ethics and political philosophy, epistemology, aesthetics, the philosophy of language, and other philosophical subfields, the contributors explore a wide range of themes in the philosophy of AI.

Researchers examine the ethical implications of AI in surgical settings
h/t Stewart Rogers @TheRealSJR
A new whitepaper coauthored by researchers at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence examines the ethics of AI in surgery, making the case that surgery and AI carry similar expectations but diverge with respect to ethical understanding.

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