“One of the biggest technological advances that we’re about now is artificial intelligence,” says Reid Blackman. The development, procurement and deployment of AI and its associated machine learning (ML) is happening at a scale and pace “we’ve not seen before, and it is only going to increase over the next few years.” Which is ‘great’, he continues, explaining how AI can take the grunt-work out of formerly paper-based iterative tasks, while increasing speed, productivity and profitability. “But it comes with real ethical risks that can and have been realised.” When they do, he says such is the nature of AI, “they always happen at scale.”
Most of us will be aware of the ‘holy trinity’ of these risks: bias, lack of transparency and privacy. But there are plenty more to go with them, as Blackman’s ‘Ethical Machines’ explains. But the underlying problem is essentially the same whichever issue you address, which is that of ending up with ethically unacceptable...