Responsible AI, a Game Changer to Maximize Beneficial Outcomes

According to an analysis carried out by PwC about how much value potential is up for grabs, AI could contribute up to an infusion of US$15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030, out of which $6.6 trillion is likely to come from increased productivity.

Some are skeptical of AI due to fears that, for example, robots will take their jobs. However, responsible AI is the answer. Responsible AI will require negotiating what boundaries should be set up so AI can operate, protect humans against unforeseeable outcomes, and ensure that people always control the technology.?

Artificial Intelligence - the powerful technology that powers today's digital world is moving towards an inevitable and desirable future. Artificial Intelligence is being used increasingly in our everyday life. But what does the idea of "responsible AI" mean, how might it be applied, and why doesn't everyone need to worry about it???

Responsible Artificial Intelligence

Responsible Artificial Intelligence is a critical initiative that seeks to produce smart AI with a balanced focus on making it beneficial to us and our environment and inclusive of all populations. Adopting the principles of responsible AI has been shown to enable better consequences for workers by improving their job satisfaction, increasing companies’ productivity and profit, and helping communities grow, innovate and thrive.

Responsible AI has two key distinctions to distinguish it from other versions of AI:

·??????The first key distinction is that Responsible AI's goal is to enrich human society, not replace humans.

·??????The second component of responsible AI promotes the public ontological responsibility principle. This means that these models should be independently verified by expert ethicists, de facto making them extremely accurate.

Why is responsible AI important?

There are many benefits to responsible AI, not least of which is the ability to save lives. Adopting the ethical values of human beings means that they don't act in an uncooperative or disruptive manner, saving lives and avoiding all kinds of accidents. They also provide the necessary context to fight crime by avoiding false positives, promoting rehabilitation, and other consequences.

The development of AI-based agents is expected to be challenging - there are risks associated with training AI systems using biased data sets - but responsibility will promote both human fulfilment and avoidable risks. In the long term, agent systems will be as advanced and adaptable as humans.

The AGI (artificial general intelligence) research community must pursue ethical and responsible development of new algorithms, data sets, ontologies, and other technologies for that to happen. AGI systems will help solve human societal problems and directly boost our economy. All this radical change in technology support and systems transformation will require the full support of AI and the IT community. There are five key challenges that the IT and AI community should address now to deliver transformative AGI solutions:

·??????The R&D of AGI should focus on achieving human-level intelligence and emotional impact.

·??????The developer community needs to diversify its software development activities across off-the-shelf (OTS) and human-centric AI solutions. This will require a balance between the traditional software development approaches on the one hand and offering products to meet business requirements on the other.

·??????The AI systems should have human intelligence as a foundation, and human-centric tools should also be part of the AI software stack.

·??????AGI needs to be highly adaptable to accommodate business processes from multiple industries.

·??????The industry must be commended for making significant strides in the enterprise AI space, including open AGI solutions to empower businesses.

Overall, building AI-based applications requires the right talent, including relevant AI experts and other personnel who can apply AI tools for generating insights and providing recommendations on operation and competitive landscape changes.

Applications of Responsible AI

Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve both our society and global economy vastly. As artificial intelligence evolves, it is important for businesses, governments, communities, and individuals alike to uphold cyber-security principles. This is to help ensure AI will serve humanity more equitably.

Responsible AI would grant people knowledge about best practices when utilizing machine learning solutions to avoid or minimize unintended consequences that may be harmful. Responsible AI could also favor independent problem solving instead of preprogrammed outcomes. This would mean that knowledge is shared between different artificial bits of intelligence so that the AI development collective can form smarter solutions.

Six key principles of responsible AI

According to Microsoft, responsible AI is based on six principles. These principles include fairness, reliability and safety, accountability, privacy and security, inclusiveness, and transparency. Underlying all these six principles is the concept of putting the humans at the center of AI development.

Regarding fairness, the principle is about being accountable to humans and accurately represent them through fairness in behavior and decision making. The second principle, reliability and safety revolve around how the AI can interpret the situation correctly with the built-in ability to self-monitor their performance. However, it is also important to recognize that AI is not always going to perform perfectly. In such cases, accountability is crucial. It is not acceptable for those who design and deploy to deny any responsibility if something goes wrong with an AI system.

For privacy and security, the two are significant risks for major privacy and security issues that could severely undermine public trust in AI. Therefore, it is paramount that developers need to ensure that systems are safe from intentional and unintentional misuse. Intelligent systems should be designed and operated with consideration for how they could impact the entire population, and so for inclusiveness, it is essential that whenever a developer develops an AI solution, they need to keep in mind accessibility.

The last principle of responsible AI, Transparency, is the substantial value that integrates the four previously mentioned values. People trust AI when built on transparent principles. Microsoft, the front runner in the responsible AI campaign, believes that we must apply transparency in AI throughout its design by embedding interpretability capabilities.

How does responsible AI contribute to business?

One of the top concerns for private companies, government agencies, and other organizations in Saudi Arabia is how to use AI responsibly. Businesses can access a powerful yet inexpensive resource that can automate content creation without human input with this technology. The goal of responsible AI is to seamlessly integrate it into business plans as an essential part of your marketing strategy. Responsible AI contributes to business by automating its processes and making decisions based on certain criteria within its dataset or just carrying out whatever tasks have been programmed into it with no intervention from a human.

Here are three tips for using AI in business responsibly:

Don't automate tasks that need human interaction:

Responsible AI doesn't 't mean automating everything. It also means not using AI in business if it's not necessary. For example, for the cases where the human touch is more important rather than automating responses to customers. Because of this responsibility to be accountable for your business should come first.

Avoid reinforcing harmful biases:

Ensure that AI doesn't replicate harmful biases and stereotypes about the customer base, or the employee population

Ensure that the AI solution doesn't just push repetitive data and information:

AI is about more than repetitive data and information. After analyzing, it's about understanding insights and discovering the true meaning of what is being presented.

What is Microsoft corporation doing in support of Responsible AI?

Microsoft's latest initiative on Responsible AI involves machine learning to achieve meaningful social impact. It is committed to making its products beneficial for society, accountable to an ethics framework, and shaped by public input. Microsoft released a set of documents outlining its ethical framework and public engagement planning process.

The technology industry must form a multi-stakeholder consortium to address AI ethics, to generate the norms, standards, and guidelines that "currently do not exist". At the same time, we must be honest in our dialogue. AI is a global tech development, and it should be recognized that the discussion on ethics has not been completely inclusive. Few women and fewer minorities have roles in the field; for example, Microsoft's AI research sector is 74 percent male. This demographic difference can be seen in the US government's new policy, encouraging the AI tech industry to hire more women and minorities for high-profile positions.

How does Responsible AI fit in Saudi Arabia?

A McKinsey report released in June 2017 offers a four-step framework about how AI can be used responsibly. The framework is broken down into:

·??????assessing the legal and regulatory environment

·??????assessing the prospective economic value

·??????setting goals, and

·??????limiting harmful outcomes.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues to develop this initiative to use the beneficial outcomes that could arise from AI for the common good of society. The utilization of AI needs to ensure that all individuals benefit from the adoption of AI and, thus, it requires that employees have access to the tools and are aware of the tools and how they work. In addition, employers need to ensure that trained employees are available to fulfill data gathering requirements.

The drive by Saudi so far towards making AI and its applications accessible to amplify beneficial outcomes, and at the same time making it a beneficial human-centric future where AI systems empower everyone and democratize it to as many people as possible, regardless of ability, and engage people by providing channels for feedback, is commendable.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence could become a game-changer to maximize beneficial outcomes if applied correctly. Adhere to the moral rules-based system, and it would be said that responsible AI has the power to change the world and enrich our lives. But the consequence of unreliable, biased and opaque AI is a daunting challenge to navigate. There has to be robust governance, appropriate policy and regulation to guide AI in the future.