AI Ethics Weekly – March 16: A Crisis of Ethics in Technology Innovation

AI Ethics Weekly – March 16: A Crisis of Ethics in Technology Innovation
March 15, 2020 LH3_Admin

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OK Google, Black History Month Is Over. What Now?
h/t Mutale Nkonde @mutalenkonde
For several years, advocates have warned that white supremacists use Google’s YouTube algorithms to spread white nationalist propaganda to recruit new members. Google’s response was slow, and reports alleged that Google executives left some content up to capitalize on engagement and views. Read More.

Franken-algorithms: The Deadly Consequences of Unpredictable Code
h/t Neil Milliken @NeilMilliken
“The death of a woman hit by a self-driving car highlights an unfolding technological crisis, as code piled on code creates ‘a universe no one fully understands.” Read More.

Why is TikTok creating filter bubbles based on your race?
h/t Michelle Carney @michellercarney
“The app’s algorithm didn’t set out to use race, age and gender to sort users, but it may have inadvertently created a biased feedback loop.” Read More.

A Crisis of Ethics in Technology Innovation
h/t Antonio Vieira Santos @AkwyZ
“The Facebook scandal is a cautionary tale for executives and consumers alike. But the lesson is much bigger than one about so-called fake news. The hasty reconstruction of value chains around new technologies is introducing and exacerbating ethical concerns across industries.” Read more. 

Curated by Maria Luciana Axente (@maria_axente)

Algorithms that run our lives are racist and sexist. Meet the women trying to fix them
From insurance payments to courtroom sentencing, AI makes increasingly complex decisions about our lives. And our belief that data is neutral allows algorithms to get away with murder. The fight back is being led by those most likely to find themselves on the wrong side of a computer’s decision. Read More.

What do we teach when we teach tech & AI ethics?
“Ethics in the context of technology (particularly emerging areas like data science and AI) is such an important topic, and curriculum coverage is increasing at universities in computer science and beyond. So our question was: what are we teaching when we teach ethics — both generally, and specifically for AI?” Read More.

Understanding artificial intelligence ethics and safety
A comprehensive guidance on the topic of AI ethics and safety in the public sector to date. It identifies the potential harms caused by AI systems and proposes concrete, operationalizable measures to counteract them. Read More.

The Robots Are Coming
Long before the singularity looms even on some distant horizon, the sort of AI technology that AI-as-engineering is likely to give us already has the potential to wreak considerable havoc on the human world. Read More.

How can algorithms be sexist?
This inequality was inadvertently and unconsciously integrated into the writing of the algorithms. “There is a big problem of gender disparity, especially in the machine learning process,” underlines Leavy. “This means that there is a lack of critical perspective.” Read More.

ICYMI

AI Ethics Newsletter – Special Issue on COVID-19
Given all the misinformation on COVID-19, we published a special issue of our AI Ethics newsletter with links to credible resources with all the information you need to make it through this pandemic. Read More.

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