May 31, 2016 01:59 AM
http://www.wired.com/2016/05/white-house...ed-future/
EXCERPT: Researchers disagree on when artificial intelligence that displays something like human understanding might arrive. But the Obama administration isn’t waiting to find out. The White House says the government needs to start thinking about how to regulate and use the powerful technology while it is still dependent on humans.
Although scholars and policymakers agree that Washington has a role to play here, it isn’t clear what the path to that policy looks like—even as pressing questions accumulate. [...] To regulate AI in the future, it makes sense to lay the foundation while humans are still at the wheel.
[...] A recent White House report outlined the discriminatory potential of big data. [...] This is not an academic issue. Google’s ad-delivery algorithm sent more ads for higher-paying jobs to men than to women. And ProPublica recently reported that judges who made sentencing and parole decisions relied upon AI systems shown to be racially biased in making risk assessments.
“The journalists found that there was this real disparity between African Americans who were being labeled as potential recidivists versus white people,” said Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford. “This was a system that was producing bias in its very design, but we can’t see how it works. The system is proprietary. They haven’t shared the data. We don’t know why the system was getting these results.”
If AI will determine things like who gets a mortgage, a job, or parole, Crawford says, it will be increasingly important to apply some level of accountability for the data fed into these systems to ensure it is accurate....
EXCERPT: Researchers disagree on when artificial intelligence that displays something like human understanding might arrive. But the Obama administration isn’t waiting to find out. The White House says the government needs to start thinking about how to regulate and use the powerful technology while it is still dependent on humans.
Although scholars and policymakers agree that Washington has a role to play here, it isn’t clear what the path to that policy looks like—even as pressing questions accumulate. [...] To regulate AI in the future, it makes sense to lay the foundation while humans are still at the wheel.
[...] A recent White House report outlined the discriminatory potential of big data. [...] This is not an academic issue. Google’s ad-delivery algorithm sent more ads for higher-paying jobs to men than to women. And ProPublica recently reported that judges who made sentencing and parole decisions relied upon AI systems shown to be racially biased in making risk assessments.
“The journalists found that there was this real disparity between African Americans who were being labeled as potential recidivists versus white people,” said Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford. “This was a system that was producing bias in its very design, but we can’t see how it works. The system is proprietary. They haven’t shared the data. We don’t know why the system was getting these results.”
If AI will determine things like who gets a mortgage, a job, or parole, Crawford says, it will be increasingly important to apply some level of accountability for the data fed into these systems to ensure it is accurate....
