AI And Ethics: We Will Live What Machines Learn

Big Data analytics, machine learning, and other emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have, in a very short time, become astonishingly good at helping companies see, and react to, patterns in data they would otherwise have missed. More and more, however, these new patterns carry difficult ethical choices. Not every connection between data points needs to be made, nor does every new insight need to be used. Consider these embarrassing real-world examples': Similarly, Microsoft had a mortifying experience in early 2016 with "Tay," a chatbot intended to be a fun experiment in training an AI to understand conversational language. However, when trolls coordinated their efforts on Twitter and in messaging apps GroupMe and Kik, they were able to teach Tay to respond to them in appallingly racist ways, forcing Microsoft to take the AI offline after just 16 hours. Artificial intelligence has already progressed to the point that we're already asking it to automate not just business processes, but ethical choices.