Commentary: Advancing Both A.I. and Privacy Is Not a Zero-Sum Game

Given the reliance of artificial intelligence on machine learning, and of machine learning on data, the conventional wisdom is that privacy and A.I. are fundamentally at odds--progress in one must come at the expense of the other. Advancing both A.I. and privacy, however, is not a zero-sum game. Researchers from academia and industry have been marrying ideas from cryptography and machine learning to provide the seemingly paradoxical ability to learn from data without seeing it. Suppose that a group of hospitals wants to build a machine learning system that analyzes patient data and estimates the likelihood of disease. In theory, by sharing their data, they could build a more accurate model, but privacy rules forbid this.