Is Your AI Ethical?

 

[Pic Courtesy: Atlantic Re:think]

A group of teachers successfully sued the Houston Independent School District (HISD) in 2017 claiming their Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated when the school district used an opaque artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to evaluate and terminate 221 teachers. The judge overturned the use of AI algorithms suggesting, “When a public agency adopts a policy of making high stakes employment decisions based on secret algorithms (aka, AI and Neural Networks) incompatible with a minimum due process, the proper remedy is to overturn the policy.”

The fields of computer modeled risk assessment and algorithmic decision making have been around for a while, but AI takes it to the next level – as demonstrated by Cambridge Analytica’s recent infamous work. AI is having an even bigger impact in our lives than that we find in movies like Terminator and I, Robot. While those movies suggest that the robots might end human freedom and control us – the biased, unfair, or downright unethical decision-making algorithms, automatically created and used by machines, pose a bigger risk to humanity.

Cognitive disruption: Where man and machine become one!

In 2017, digital disruption is history. If you are not thinking about cognitive disruption, your business is way behind in the technology curve.

In the recent IBM annual survey of global CEOs, about 73 percent say cognitive computing will play an important role in the near future of their organizations, with the same sentiment echoed by other c-suite executives as well. While almost three-fourths of CEOs agree that their businesses, and their industries, will be disrupted by cognitive computing in the near future, surprisingly only about half of these CEOs are planning to adopt cognitive computing by 2020.

While that may seem stunning, the primary reason is pretty clear: infusing cognition into an existing infrastructure is extremely difficult, very time-consuming and will be very expensive.