Getting Government AI Engineers to Tune into AI Ethics Seen as Challenge - AI Trends

Engineers tend to see things in unambiguous terms, which some may call Black and White terms, such as a choice between right or wrong and good and bad. The consideration of ethics in AI is highly nuanced, with vast gray areas, making it challenging for AI software engineers to apply it in their work. That was a takeaway from a session on the Future of Standards and Ethical AI at the AI World Government conference held in-person and virtually in Alexandria, Va. this week. An overall impression from the conference is that the discussion of AI and ethics is happening in virtually every quarter of AI in the vast enterprise of the federal government, and the consistency of points being made across all these different and independent efforts stood out. "We engineers often think of ethics as a fuzzy thing that no one has really explained," stated Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech, an associate professor, Engineering Management and Entrepreneurship at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, speaking at the Future of Ethical AI session.