70. Sarah Williams - What does ethical AI even mean?
Towards Data Science
02/10/21
•45m
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There’s no question that AI ethics has received a lot of well-deserved attention lately. But ask the average person what ethics AI means, and you’re as likely as not to get a blank stare. I think that’s largely because every data science or machine learning problem comes with a unique ethical context, so it can be hard to pin down ethics principles that generalize to a wide class of AI problems.
Fortunately, there are researchers who focus on just this issue— and my guest today, Sarah Williams, is one of them. Sarah is an associate professor of urban planning and the director of the Civic Data Design Lab at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning School. Her job is to study applications of data science to urban planning, and to work with policymakers on applying AI in an ethical way. Through that process, she’s distilled several generalizable AI ethics principles that have practical and actionable implications.
This episode was a wide-ranging discussion about everything from the way our ideologies can colour our data analysis to the challenges governments face when trying to regulate AI.
Previous Episode
69. Anders Sandberg - Answering the Fermi Question: Is AI our Great Filter?
February 3, 2021
•65m
The apparent absence of alien life in our universe has been a source of speculation and controversy in scientific circles for decades. If we assume that there’s even a tiny chance that intelligent life might evolve on a given planet, it seems almost impossible to imagine that the cosmos isn’t brimming with alien civilizations. So where are they?
That’s what Anders Sandberg calls the “Fermi Question”: given the unfathomable size of the universe, how come we have seen no signs of alien life? Anders is a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, where he tries to anticipate the ethical, philosophical and practical questions that human beings are going to have to face as we approach what could be a technologically unbounded future. That work focuses to a great extent on superintelligent AI and the existential risks it might create. As part of that work, he’s studied the Fermi Question in great detail, and what it implies for the scarcity of life and the value of the human species.
Next Episode
71. Ben Garfinkel - Superhuman AI and the future of democracy and government
February 17, 2021
•68m
As we continue to develop more and more sophisticated AI systems, an increasing number of economists, technologists and futurists have been trying to predict what the likely end point of all this progress might be. Will human beings be irrelevant? Will we offload all of our decisions — from what we want to do with our spare time, to how we govern societies — to machines? And what is the emergence of highly capable and highly general AI systems mean for the future of democracy and governance?
These questions are impossible to answer completely and directly, but it may be possible to get some hints by taking a long-term view at the history of human technological development. That’s a strategy that my guest, Ben Garfinkel, is applying in his research on the future of AI. Ben is a physicist and mathematician who now does research on forecasting risks from emerging technologies at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute.
Apart from his research on forecasting the future impact of technologies like AI, Ben has also spent time exploring some classic arguments for AI risk, many of which he disagrees with. Since we’ve had a number of guests on the podcast who do take these risks seriously, I thought it would be worth speaking to Ben about his views as well, and I’m very glad I did.
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