Reboot AI with human values

A security staff member wears augmented-reality glasses to measure people's body temperatures in Hangzhou, China.Credit: Wang Gang/China News Service/Getty In the 1980s, a plaque at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, declared: "In God we trust. All others must bring data." Helga Nowotny's latest book, In AI We Trust, is more than a play on the first phrase in this quote attributed to statistician W. Edwards Deming. It is most occupied with the second idea. What happens, Nowotny asks, when we deploy artificial intelligence (AI) without interrogating its effectiveness, simply trusting that it'works'?