A new law enforcement app called Clearview is taking a leap into the legal unknown by creating one of the biggest known facial recognition databases around, powered by 3 billion public pictures pulled from social media.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has already had a profound impact on business and society. Applied AI and machine learning (ML) are creating safer workplaces, more accurate health diagnoses and better access to information for global citizens. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will represent a new era of partnership between humans and AI, with potentially positive global impact. AI advancements can help society solve problems of income inequality and food insecurity to create a more "inclusive, human-centred future" according to the World Economic Forum (WEF). There is nearly limitless potential to AI innovation, which is both positive and frightening.

How can societies learn to enforce and comply with social norms? Here we investigate the learning dynamics and emergence of compliance and enforcement of social norms in a foraging game, implemented in a multi-agent reinforcement learning setting. In this spatiotemporally extended game, individuals are incentivized to implement complex berry-foraging policies and punish transgressions against social taboos covering specific berry types. We show that agents benefit when eating poisonous berries is taboo, meaning the behavior is punished by other agents, as this helps overcome a credit-assignment problem in discovering delayed health effects. Critically, however, we also show that introducing an additional taboo, which results in punishment for eating a harmless berry, improves the rate and stability with which agents learn to punish taboo violations and comply with taboos. Counterintuitively, our results show that an arbitrary taboo (a "silly rule") can enhance social learning dynamics and achieve better outcomes in the middle stages of learning. We discuss the results in the context of studying normativity as a group-level emergent phenomenon.

Among companies building and deploying artificial intelligence, and the consumers making use of this technology, trust is of paramount importance. Companies want the comfort of knowing how their AI systems are making determinations, and that they are in compliance with any relevant regulations, and consumers want to know when the technology is being used and how (or whether) it will impact their lives. Source: Morning Consult study conducted on behalf of the IBM Policy Lab, January 2020. As outlined in our Principles for Trust and Transparency, IBM has long argued that AI systems need to be transparent and explainable. That's one reason why we supported the OECD AI Principles, and in particular the need to "commit to transparency and responsible disclosure" in the use of AI systems. Principles are admirable and can help communicate a company's commitments to citizens and consumers.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have been exploring the need to set ethics standards and policies when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence, and they now have their own place to do so. The university has created a new Center of Ethics, Society and Computing (ESC) that will focus on AI, data usage, augmented and virtual reality, privacy, open data and identity. According to the center's website, the name and abbreviation alludes to the "ESC" key on a computer keyboard, which was added to interrupt a program when it produced unwanted results. "In the same way, the Center for Ethics, Society and Computing (ESC -- pronounced'escape') is dedicated to intervening when digital media and computing technologies reproduce inequality, exclusion, corruption, deception, racism or sexism," the center's mission statement reads. The center will bring together scholars who are committed to "feminist, justice-focused, inclusive and interdisciplinary approaches to computing," the university said in a news release.

Police in London are moving ahead with a deploying a facial recognition camera system despite privacy concerns and evidence that the technology is riddled with false positives. The Metropolitan Police, the U.K.'s biggest police department with jurisdiction over most of London, announced Friday it would begin rolling out new "live facial recognition" cameras in London, making the capital one of the largest cities in the West to adopt the controversial technology. The "Met," as the police department is known in London, said in a statement the facial recognition technology, which is meant to identify people on a watch list and alert police to their real-time location, would be "intelligence-led" and deployed to only specific locations. It's expected to be rolled out as soon as next month. However, privacy activists immediately raised concerns, noting that independent reviews of trials of the technology showed a failure rate of 81%.

As numerous authors have documented, the idea of creating artificial, intelligent machines has entranced and scandalized people for millennia. Indeed, part of what makes the history of'artificial intelligence' so fascinating is the mix of genuine scientific achievement with myth-making and outright deception. A certain amount of hype and myth making can be harmless, and might even help to fuel real progress in the field. However, the fact that'AI systems' are now being integrated into essential public services and other high-risk processes means that we must be especially vigilant about combatting misconceptions about AI. At various points throughout 2019, we saw users of Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant, and Apple's Siri being shocked to discover that recordings of their private family conversations were being reviewed by real living humans. This was hardly surprising to anyone familiar with how these voice assistants are trained. But to the majority of customers, who do not question the presentation of these systems as 100% automated, it came as a shock that poorly paid overseas workers had access to what were often intimate and sensitive conversations.

This week, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty called for AI to get its own regulation system. Alphabet CEO Pichai stated that it was "too important not to", going on to expand by explaining that sectors within AI technology, such as autonomous cars and healthtech, needed their own sets of rules. IBM CEO Rometty joined the discussion with the idea of'precision regulation', stating that it is not the technology itself, but how it is used that should be regulated, using facial recognition as an example of technology that can harm people's privacy as well as having its benefits, such as catching criminals. Asheesh Mehra, co-founder and CEO at AntWorks, explains why regulating AI is important. Without it, the technology won't take the world by storm These announcements have come in spite of recent setbacks in the sphere; just last week it was revealed that the European Commission were considering a five year ban on facial recognition, and Google's last attempt to assemble an AI ethics board lasted under two weeks due to controversy over who was appointed.

As artificial intelligence or AI keeps on discovering its way into our everyday lives, its propensity to interfere with human rights just gets progressively extreme. There are a few lenses through which experts examine artificial intelligence. The utilization of international human rights law and its well-created standards and organizations to examine artificial intelligence frameworks can add to the conversations already occurring, and give a universal vocabulary and forums set up to address power differentials. Moreover, human rights laws contribute a system for solutions. General solutions fall inside four general classifications: data protection rules to ensure rights in the data sets used to create and encourage artificial intelligence systems; special safeguards for government uses of artificial intelligence; safeguards for private sector use of artificial intelligence systems; and investment in more research to keep on looking at the future of artificial intelligence and its potential interferences with human rights.

One of the most powerful men in IT, Sundar Pichai, has backed regulations for artificial intelligence. While Pichai isn't the first big tech executive to say so publicly, his voice matters, given that Google is arguably the world's largest AI Company. Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk has been vocal about the need for regulating AI several times in the past. Musk even said that "by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it's too late". Microsoft president Brad Smith is another prominent person in tech who has called for regulation of AI.