AI Ethics

Most of us living today have begun to realize the importance of Artificial Intelligence in our daily lives and with technology evolving at its current rate, we’ve also begun to realize its growing importance in our society. However, we need to be careful when dealing with and developing AI to avoid a possible Skynet-like scenario in the not-so-distant future. So the topic of AI ethics comes into play now more than ever. We need a set of rules to define how we develop Ai technologies that can allow us to reap its numerous benefits and prevent the possible disadvantages especially since we are living in a time where the possibility of harm in AI has to be addressed as soon as possible. To dive into these topics we first need a clear understanding of what exactly is meant by AI ethics? Artificial Intelligence ethics, or AI ethics, comprise a set of values, principles, and techniques which employ widely accepted standards of right and wrong to guide moral conduct in the development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence technologies.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation are dramatically changing and influencing our society. Applying principles of AI ethics to the design and implementation of algorithmic or intelligent systems and AI projects in the public sector is paramount. AI ethics will guarantee that the development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence are ethical, safe, and uttermost responsible. Why do we need AI ethics in an age where we feel that machines can be impartial and rule without any biases or impunity? Well here are some of the numerous reasons why.
One of the fields where we’ve seen a rise in the use case of AI in the field of facial and voice recognition systems. These have many practical real-world applications. However, these systems could be vulnerable to biases and errors introduced by their human creators. Despite the intelligence is artificial, the creator is ultimately human and he or she is bound to err in some way or the other whether deliberate or unintentional. Another source of bias could be the data that is used to train these AI systems in the first place. For example, facial recognition algorithms made by Microsoft, IBM, and Face++ all had biases when it came to detecting people’s gender. These AI systems were able to detect the gender of white men more accurately than the gender of darker skin men. Further, a 2020 study reviewed voice recognition systems from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, and Microsoft found that they have higher error rates when transcribing black people’s voices than white people’s. Furthermore, Amazon terminated their use of AI hiring and recruitment because the algorithm favored male candidates over female ones. This was because Amazon’s system was trained with data collected over the 10-year period that came mostly from male candidates. As evidence from these examples biases can creep into advanced algorithms in many ways making it near impossible to have a clear unbiased view.
There are multiple more cases where it is extremely easy for AI to go rogue and bring forth tremendous destruction in our civilisation. Hence it is our duty as a technologically advanced species to hold AI ethics to its highest standard when progressing in this field as humanitys greatest boon can turn out to be it’s greatest bane.