On September 8–9 2021, ForHumanity, a public charity formed to examine and analyse the downside risks associated with the advance of AI, organized their first international conference. …

Legend has it that towards the end of the 12th century, the heroic figure Robin Hood set out to steal from the rich and give to the poor. More than 900 years later, two American entrepreneurs borrowed his name to establish a fintech company, Robinhood, that promises to “provide everyone…

It took me a couple of days to realize what that sudden Clubhouse buzz in my Twitter feed was about. I was just recovering from the shock I had when I realized that the messaging service Signal, which has been hyped as a privacy-friendly alternative to Whatsapp, notified anyone who…

Everyone concerned with ethics is probably used to cringing while reading news on AI. For me, one of the most reliable triggers for such cringing is the talk about ‘democratizing AI’; and I am not the only one. Take this: Selling video analytics as “surveillance in a box” is said…

Bias, discrimination, privacy violations, lack of accountability — AI entails a lot of ethical problems. Hyping AI creates additional ethical challenges on top of the existing ones. Here is how: 1. We do not need AI for everything The AI hype epitomizes the belief that we need AI for everything…

On January 15 2020, Meredith Whittaker, Cofounder of the AI Now Institute, gave a testimony, entitled “Facial Recognition Technology (Part III): Ensuring Commercial Transparency & Accuracy”, at the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform. The testimony provides excellent insight into how facial recognition technology can exacerbate inequality…

Facial recognition has come under massive scrutiny, not least since its live variant has come to attention. Approaches to using it are quite divided. …

A few weeks ago, the San Francisco based think tank Open AI published a paper titled “AI Safety Needs Social Scientists”. The paper describes a new approach to aligning AI with human values, i.e. ensuring that AI systems reliably do what humans want, by treating it as a learning problem…

Beim Lesen des ausgezeichneten Berichts des Council of Europe zu «Diskriminierung, KI und algorithmischen Entscheiden» (auf englisch) fragte ich mich, inwiefern algorithmische Entscheidungen dazu beitragen können, Diskriminierung in bereits stark gespaltenen Gesellschaften zu verstärken. Zu meiner Überraschung katapultierte der Bericht mich beinahe 20 Jahre zurück in die Zeit, als ich…