Ethical Issues Surrounding the Development of Artificial Intelligence
Ishika Arora
Morgan Stanley 2024 Technology Analyst | Computer Science Student at King's College London
As much as the growth of Artificial Intelligence is revolutionising the way we are able to use technology, it is absolutely vital to ensure that ethical issues are considered and minimised whilst creating anything that incorporates Artificial Intelligence within it.
Can AI based systems be biased?
Despite AI’s unmatched efficiency, we cannot override the potential bias that it inherits during the creation of the algorithms, data and the human intervention associated with it. As Artificial Intelligence algorithms are developed using humans; they have the ability to inherit the potential bias of data and human intervention. Such bias has been seen in AI based face recognition systems where the algorithms are trained on white faces and are unable to recognise black, brown or Asian faces. Quite recently, Microsoft took down a large face database which was used by researchers to train face recognition methods because the database was not sufficiently representative of all ethnicities. With the increased dependency of organizations upon AI, it becomes extremely vital that such anomalies should be monitored carefully.
Is AI slowing down human intelligence?
Due to humans’ increasing reliance on technology, a prominent issue that mankind is speculating over is whether the development of Artificial Intelligence is slowing down the development of human intelligence. For instance, Google’s search engine is a tool that humans use extremely frequently. Most questions can be answered within a matter of seconds without using any thinking or reasoning skills. Could this mean that we are missing out on opportunities to strengthen our reasoning skills? The flipside to this argument is that with the changing times, we face new issues, our priorities change accordingly, and we must train ourselves to focus on developing other parts of our intelligence. For instance, despite being surrounded by information just a click away, we are seeing new business solutions, many inventions in different fields, medical sciences making ground-breaking discoveries. All of this reflects that AI is not slowing down human Intelligence instead is supplying us with the opportunity to concentrate on more important issues and simultaneously developing our creative intelligence.
Are we more vulnerable?
Other issues that emerge with the development of AI are a lack of security and the detrimental effects that will arise if AI falls into the wrong hands. For instance, AI-boosted/based cyber-attacks would mean that anomaly detection algorithms would work much more efficiently to find flaws in the systems they are trying to hack. However, with the change in threat being recognised, I am sure we’ll find solution to curb these crimes too.
After acknowledging all of these ethical issues, the most important question to address is how we are preparing ourselves to navigate through this new era of technology fuelled by AI.
Technology Risk Executive, Information & Cyber Security | ex-Goldman Sachs | Leader
4 年Very interesting Ishika Arora and good points raised. Would love to see a follow up to this article with ways these bias’ can be addressed. Let’s face it, the AI train has left the station. It’s now at a point that we are steering the train...
Senior Manager at KPMG UK | Employee Benefits & Total Reward
4 年Excellent article with phycological lens on. Most of articles I’ve read in recent times are too focused on the technical and logistics aspects of Artificial intelligence. Would be great if you now think of the consequences of these points e.g we might have a Instagram generation having over reliance on technology and search engines impacting their sense of empathy and wider feelings to express some of the core emotions.
Helping Manufacturing customers to navigate the change
4 年Good one Ishika !!! Yes, these are very valid observations, key is, how do we maintain equilibrium ? E.g. With advanced AI lead cyber threats, there is a need for equally advanced and intelligent threat identification/neutralization systems as well. That is where young engineers like you come in.