The first question many people ask about artificial intelligence (AI) is, "Will it be good or bad?" The answer is … yes. Canadian company BlueDot used AI technology to detect the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, just hours after the first cases were diagnosed. Compiling data from local news reports, social media accounts and government documents, the infectious disease data analytics firm warned of the emerging crisis a week before the World Health Organization made any official announcement. While predictive algorithms could help us stave off pandemics or other global threats as well as manage many of our day-to-day challenges, AI's ultimate impact is impossible to predict.

Elon Musk has warned that humans risk being overtaken by artificial intelligence within the next five years. The prediction marks a significant revision of previous estimations of the so-called technological singularity, when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence and accelerates at an incomprehensible rate. Noted futurist Ray Kurzweil previously pegged this superintelligence tipping point at around 2045, citing exponential advances in technologies like robotics, computers and AI. Mr Musk, whose ventures include electric car maker Tesla and space firm SpaceX, said in an interview with The New York Times that current trends suggest AI could overtake humans by 2025. The billionaire engineer, who also helped found the artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI in 2015, has consistently warned of the existential threat posed by advanced artificial intelligence in recent years.

This is an ethics guide for United States Intelligence Community personnel on how to procure, design, build, use, protect, consume, and manage AI and related data. Answering these questions, in conjunction with your agency-specific procedures and practices, promotes ethical design of AI consistent with the Principles of AI Ethics for the Intelligence Community. This guide is not a checklist and some of the concepts discussed herein may not apply in all instances. Instead, this guide is a living document intended to provide stakeholders with a reasoned approach to judgment and to assist with the documentation of considerations associated with the AI lifecycle. In doing so, this guide will enable mission through an enhanced understanding of goals between AI practitioners and managers while promoting the ethical use of AI.

UNESCO has embarked on a two-year process to elaborate the first global standard-setting instrument on the ethics of artificial intelligence in the form of a Recommendation, following the decision of UNESCO's General Conference at its 40th session in November 2019. In 2020, the focus will be on preparing the draft text for the Recommendation with the assistance of an Ad Hoc Expert Group. This phase will include inclusive and multidisciplinary consultations with a wide range of stakeholders. These broad consultations are extremely important to ensure that the draft text is as inclusive as possible. Towards the end of 2020 and in 2021, the focus will be on an intergovernmental process and on negotiation on the draft text to produce a final version of the Recommendation for possible adoption by UNESCO's General Conference at its 41st session at the end of 2021.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) has launched a global online consultation on the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), which will be used by the organisation's international group of AI experts to help draft a framework governing how the technology is applied globally. The multidisciplinary unit of 24 AI specialists, known as the Ad Hoc Expert Group (AHEG), was formed in March 2020, and has been tasked with producing a draft Unesco recommendation that takes into account the wide-ranging impacts of AI, including on the environment, labour markets and culture. The first draft text of its recommendation was published on 15 May 2020, which Unesco is now inviting the public to comment on until 31 July 2020. It outlined 11 principles for the "research, design, development, deployment and use of AI systems", including fairness, responsibility and accountability, human oversight and determination, sustainability, mutli-stakeholder and adaptive governance, and privacy, among others. The text also outlined six values that would provide the foundation for these principles, which are human dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms, leaving no one behind, living in harmony, trustworthiness, and protection of the environment. "It is crucial that as many people as possible take part in this consultation, so that voices from around the world can be heard during the drafting process for the first global normative instrument on the ethics of AI," said Audrey Azoulay, director-general of Unesco.

With great power, the saying goes, comes great responsibility. As artificial intelligence (AI) technology becomes more powerful, many groups are taking an interest in ensuring its responsible use. The questions that surround AI ethics can be difficult, and the operational aspects of addressing AI ethics are complex. Fortunately, these questions are already driving debate and action in the public and commercial sectors. Organizations using AI-based applications should take note.

The wait is over: artificial intelligence (AI) is here. And despite apocalyptic predictions about workers being replaced by intelligent machines, leading organizations are taking a new tack: actively searching for strategies to integrate AI into teams to produce transformative business results. These "superteams" hold the promise of enabling organizations to reinvent themselves to create new value and meaning, while giving workers the potential to reinvent their careers in ways that help increase their value to the organization and their own employability. For organizations that still view AI mainly as an automation tool to reduce costs, connecting their AI initiatives with their efforts to craft more effective teams is a first step toward enabling humans and machines to work together in new, more productive ways. The Readiness Gap: Fifty-nine percent of organizations say the redesign of jobs to integrate AI technology is important or very important for their success over the next 12 to 18 months, but only 7 percent say they are very ready to address this trend.

If your organization is implementing or thinking of implementing a contact-tracing app, it's wise to consider more than just workforce safety. Failing to do so could expose your company other risks such as employment-related lawsuits and compliance issues. More fundamentally, companies should be thinking about the ethical implications of their AI use. Contact-tracing apps are raising a lot of questions. For example, should employers be able to use them? If so, must employees opt-in or can employers make them mandatory?

This is an updated version. Turing Award Winner and Facebook Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun has announced his exit from popular social networking platform Twitter after getting involved in a long and often acrimonious dispute regarding racial biases in AI. Unlike most other artificial intelligence researchers, LeCun has often aired his political views on social media platforms, and has previously engaged in public feuds with colleagues such as Gary Marcus. This time however LeCun's penchant for debate saw him run afoul of what he termed "the linguistic codes of modern social justice." It all started on June 20 with a tweet regarding the new Duke University PULSE AI photo recreation model that had depixelated a low-resolution input image of Barack Obama into a photo of a white male.

In October, Amazon had to discontinue an artificial intelligence–powered recruiting tool after it discovered the system was biased against female applicants. In 2016, a ProPublica investigation revealed a recidivism assessment tool that used machine learning was biased against black defendants. More recently, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development sued Facebook because its ad-serving algorithms enabled advertisers to discriminate based on characteristics like gender and race. And Google refrained from renewing its AI contract with the Department of Defense after employees raised ethical concerns. Those are just a few of the many ethical controversies surrounding artificial intelligence algorithms in the past few years.