Artificial Intelligence Seeks An Ethical Conscience - Robot Watch

LEADING ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE RESEARCHERS gathered recently for the prestigious Neural Information Processing Systems conference have a new topic on their agenda. The issue was crystallized in a keynote from Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford. The conference, which drew nearly 8,000 researchers to Long Beach, California, is deeply technical, swirling in dense clouds of math and algorithms. Crawford's good-humored talk featured no equations and took the form of an ethical wake-up call. She urged attendees to start considering, and finding ways to mitigate, accidental or intentional harms caused by their creations.