Why should we care about AI Ethics?
The realm of Artificial Intelligence is improving and expanding rapidly. Industries are curious to know more about AI as there are endless applications of AI. Artificial Intelligence mimics human action; therefore, it is lightning the burden of humanity. Big Tech giants are researching the new capabilities of AI.
Many of the researchers are keeping an eye on the potential risk of Artificial Intelligence. One of the issues is ethical issues. Therefore some questions are raising by those researchers that cannot be neglected some of these are:
- Do system changes affect human behavior? If yes, How?
- Is it able to deliver the truth?
- Is it sure that the system is not discriminatory?
- Is it harming humanity?
- Is it respecting human morals and rights?
- Is it delivering correct information?
Today, we will discuss these questions briefly and talk about some technologies that can answer these questions and make AI acceptable.
Why do we need Ethics in AI?
Data has never been more accessible than now; still, it is continuously growing. AI and data together come with patterns and help to make decisions. Thus simplifying life. But along with the benefits, AI comes with some challenges, fears, and Ethical risks. These risks cannot be ignored. Let’s discuss some points to understand better why we need to care for AI Ethics?
According to human and machine interaction, the system may have various emotional and psychological effects on humans. These include things like uncertainty, anxiety, and harm to self-esteem or positive self-identity, as well as more apparent harms like attention hijacking, gaslighting, or reputation damage.
It is because it is focused on the thing that can be easily measured rather than feelings in technology. It gives false comfort. Technology should respect human morals and rights and provide human-centered AI. Therefore it should have some ethics or regulations.
A measure of customer well-being must guide AI system design. It must involve mental, physical, and social well-being.
What are the Ethics of Technology?
Technology must have certain principles to build a better future for humanity. It defends and promotes human rights and values. The following are some examples of technological ethics:
- Access Rights: As a right or freedom, humans have access to empowering technology.
- Accountability: Provide transparency for the accountability of decisions made by technology.
- Digital Rights: Technology must protect intellectual property, personality, and privacy rights.
- Freedom: Technology must not be a threat to the global quality of life.
- Human Judgement: Enure human involvement when a human judgment is required to make decisions.
- Privacy: According to privacy rights, always respect the privacy of an individual’s data and always make it a high priority while collecting, analyzing, sharing, and interpreting. It can be possible by defining access, owner, and permission of data.
- Security: Ensure information security to protect user’s psychological, emotional, intellectual, digital, and physical safety.
- Terms of Service: Technology must obey respected laws defined by the government.
- Fundamental Rights: Technology must respect the fundamental rights of an individual.
- Well Being: Technology must work for mankind’s well-being.
Read more about Ethical AI in Healthcare and its Principles.
What are the opportunities of AI?
An increasing number of AI applications change the face of the market. It offers new possibilities and improves the sustainability of products across various industries. Let’s discuss some of the opportunities that AI provides:
AI in Marketing: Every organization is focusing on marketing to maximize its revenue. They are trying to learn new approaches and activities to deliver the highest return on investment.
But monitoring and analyzing the cross channel data is a complicated and time-consuming task.
AI-enabled systems help in managing cross-channel market operations. Thus, it can analyze the targeted customers’ sentiments and recommend distributed activities that can improve customer interaction based on their interests.
AI can track and automate monitoring of overall spend thus save the time of supervisors.
Track Competitors: As technology advances, the competition is also increasing. It is crucial to keep track of the competitors, but it becomes difficult for the supervisors to track all the competitors due to the busy schedule.
Therefore, various tools are built using AI to analyze the competitors based on the website, social media, and apps. It provides a close look into any changes in competitors’ plans.
AI in Public Services: AI in public services will minimize costs and open up new possibilities in areas such as public transportation, education, electricity, and waste management, as well as enhance product sustainability.
Strengthening Democracy: Data-driven decision prevents disinformation and cyber attacks. It helps to find the correct pattern and track disorders in the data. Thus make strong democracy by ensuring quality access to the information.
Mitigating the prejudice helps to initiate and make strong diversity and openness in an AI-driven application using data.
Secure and Safe: AI also helps to prevent crime and make the environment safe. Based on the data, AI can track the prisoner’s flight risk and predict the crime and terrorist attack in less time, thus preventing them from occurring. Already some online platforms start using this to detect unlawful and inappropriate behavior.
In the military, AI may defend against hacking and phishing and target key networks in cyberwarfare.
What are the Dangers of AI?
No doubt AI has so many opportunities but has challenges also. These are:
AI Bias: A lot of AI applications are noticed that have different behavior for a particular community, such as based on race, gender, and age. Bias in AI can have negative stereotypes and put women, minorities, and other social groups at risk.
For instance, “Apple card,” the AI system of Apple, is biased against gender. It was offering significantly different interest rates and credit limits to different genders. It is giving large credit limits to men as compared to women. With traditional “black box” AI systems, it would be challenging for an AI to analyze and understand where this bias originated.
Facial Recognition Errors: The use of AI for facial recognition is automating various processes. But it is noticed that AI is making errors while detecting and recognizing a face.
An experiment is run by the ACLU (Massachusetts American Civil Liberties Union). It is noticed that facial recognition software misidentify 25 professional athletes as criminals containing 3 -time Duron Harmon, a super bowl champion of the New England Patriots football team. They found a 1 in 6 false positive identification rate when hundreds of athletes’ photos compared with the mugshot database.
Deep Fakes: It is AI-generated audio or video content used to target a person with an intent to deceive into the false event. Machine-generated videos have a huge potential to damage society by spreading disinformation and facilitating cybercrime attacks.
There have been a lot of successful instances of deep fakes used for targeted social engineering attacks. It is a challenge for the government, researchers, and social media outlets to detect deep fakes.
AI and Politics
The dark horses create a fundamental challenge for the democratic system. Policymakers and politicians disregard the importance of AI.
Politicians study people’s perspectives by using AI, and then they modify their views accordingly. Many real-time cases are there to use AI by politicians to know the people’s perspective and mold views accordingly.
Thus with increasing opportunities, potential threats to individuals or society are also growing. Therefore, the right approach is required to govern a wide variety of AI applications and technologies that dramatically impact society.
How can Ethics in AI have a better future?
Setting AI regulations risk of AI can be reduced, such as mass surveillance and human rights violations. It is a must to have sensible regulation to balance the potential harms and benefits of AI.
Numerous researchers are taking the initiative to develop AI that would follow ethical standards.
Some ethical frameworks can minimize AI risks and ensure a safe, fair, and human-centered AI. We will discuss some feature of Ethical AI that would tell us better than how they make AI systems more safe and fair:
Social Well-being: Ethical AI makes the system available for the individual, society, and the environment’s sake. It will work for the benefit of mankind.
Avoid Unfair Bias: The AI system that is designed is ethically fair. It will not do any unfair discrimination against individuals or groups. It provides equitable access and treatment. It detects and reduces unfair biases based on race, gender, nationality, etc.
Privacy and Security: AI systems keep data security at the top. Ethical AI-designed systems provide proper data governance and model management systems. Privacy and preserving AI principles help to keep the data secure.
Reliable and Safe: The AI system works only for the intended purpose, thus reducing unknown mishappening chances.
Transparency and Explainability: Ethical system explains each prediction and output. It provides transparency for the logic of the model. Users get to know the contribution of data for the output. This disclosure justifies the output and builds trust.
Akira AI systems obey the principles of Explainable AI; therefore, it provides complete transparency and explainability of systems that build users' trust.
Governable: We are designing a system that works on intended tasks. It detects and avoids unintended consequences.
Value Alignment: Humans are making decisions by considering universal values. Ethical frameworks help to consider those universal values.
Human-Centered: Ethical AI system values human diversity, freedom, autonomy, and rights. It serves humans by respecting human values. The system is not performing any unfair and unjustified actions. It respects individual freedom and autonomy. Our systems are fair and protected. Our system respects the rights of individuals.
Conclusion
AI is seen by many as a tremendous transformative tech. Once we consider machines as entities that can perceive, feel and act, it's not a giant leap to ponder their legal status. Some questions are about mitigating suffering, some about risking adverse outcomes. It makes sense to spend time thinking about what we want from these systems and what they should do and address ethical questions to build these systems with humanity's common good in mind.
