On the Ethics of AI

Concise piece on the topic from Cisco

Analytics & Automation

Ethics of Artificial Intelligence  in Cisco Blog

Utkarsh Srivastava

Intelligent machines have helped humans in achieving great endeavors. Artificial Intelligence (AI) combined with human experiences have resulted in quick wins for stakeholders across multiple industries, with use cases ranging from finance to healthcare to marketing to operations and more. There is no denying the fact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has helped in quicker product innovation and an enriching user experience. However, few of these use cases include context-aware marketing, sales forecasting, conversational analytics, fraud detection, credit scoring, drug testing, pregnancy monitoring, self-driving cars – a never-ending list of applications.

But the very idea of developing smart machines (AI-powered systems) raises numerous ethical concerns. What is the probability that these smart machines won’t harm humans or other morally relevant beings? Matthew Hutson, a research scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mentioned in one of his studies that AI algorithms embedded in digital and social media technologies can reinforce societal biases, accelerate the spread of rumors and disinformation, amplify echo chambers of public opinion, hijack our attention, and impair mental well-being. Earlier discussions related to this concept of “Data and AI ethics” were only limited to non-profit organizations and academic institutions. But with the rapidly changing industry spectrum, global tech giants are putting together fast-growing teams to handle the ethics of AI. And as these companies have invested more due diligence into the challenge, they’ve discovered that the majority of these ethical issues arise during the lifecycle of data resulting from the widespread collection and processing of data to train AI models. ... '