High-Stakes AI Decisions Need to Be Automatically Audited

Today's AI systems make weighty decisions regarding loans, medical diagnoses, parole, and more. They're also opaque systems, which makes them susceptible to bias. In the absence of transparency, we will never know why a 41-year-old white male and an 18-year-old black woman who commit similar crimes are assessed as "low risk" versus "high risk" by AI software. Oren Etzioni is CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a professor in the Allen School of Computer Science at the University of Washington. Tianhui Michael Li is founder and president of Pragmatic Data, a data science and AI training company.