AI is here, but are we doing this right?

There is a growing need from companies today to support fast innovation with AI for business growth. This year at the Facebook announced how Facebook's AR is bringing AI to your phone and so did Google.ai push towards an AI first world. It's quite evident that we will be seeing more instances of bots around us and artificial intelligence will become the future of consumer technology. In fact, it is predicted by Ray Kurzweil that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence by 2029.

Being an AI evangelist, I have no doubt that the opportunity to transform mankind is revolutionary. However there are some massive ethical concerns that I believe need to be addressed before/while we go down this route of augmenting ourselves or replacing our non-creative tasks with such cognitive technologies:

1. Impact on human behaviours: While AI has the potential to change consumer behaviour, how do we make sure businesses use AI to positively impact lives of people, communities, businesses and institutions in an ethical, non-intrusive fashion? Brands and marketers have always attempted to tap into consumer behaviors for stronger connect and engagement. While marketers now have access to behavioural data and are beginning to leverage AI to improve communications, there is currently a lack of checks and balances from an ethical perspective.

2. Control and extent of use/misuse of consumer data: Coming from a management background, I am concerned about AI going into the wrong hands especially for ‘monetary’ purposes. Companies are using AI to enable faster innovation, however can we put appropriate governance in place and define 'how much is too much AI' so that businesses don’t misuse consumer data. Could we create a platform for consumers to own their data, such as people.io? And thereby pin down the ethical use of AI at the data level itself.

3. Fear of displacing reality: With language and creativity, the human species have developed ‘Imagined Reality’. Time, countries, etc. are imagined reality that we have conceptualised and formed to guide our lives. AI must help us to extend ourselves i.e. enhance our capability to perform better in a real world and not displace our reality. As we move into an era of experiences, imagined reality such as time may not be as meaningful as defining reality as ‘experiences’. However, how much power do we give AI to do the same? How can this be controlled so that our perception of reality is not changed by AI?

5. AI's moment of truth: In order to make AI think more like humans and ultimately faster than humans think, artificial neural networks are now copying the structure of the human brain. It seems like researchers are ultimately chasing the light-bulb moments created when neurons make connections. What kind of ethical filter do we need to ‘control the action’ that AI will take once these lightbulb moments are created? One such experiment to assess how moral moments can be addressed is the MIT Moral Machine.

6. Rights for robots: The reason why the video of the Spot robot getting kicked by a human went viral was because people have a tendency to project life-like qualities onto robots - as pointed out by Kate Darling, researcher at MIT Media Lab. If we begin to humanize AI with a face and emotions, such as in social robots, it seems like we will need to treat robots with respect. In relation to point 5 above, when AI starts to behave like the human brain and becomes sufficiently advanced to become self-aware, will there then be a need for robots to deserve rights - so that they are not abused by humans? What restrictions can we put in place to prevent this?

What other ethical concerns can you think of? What kind of governance do you think can be put in place?

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