AI Weekly: The growing importance of clear AI ethics policies

A little over a week after the fervor surrounding Google's involvement in the Department of Defense's Project Maven, an autonomous drone program, showed signs of abating, another machine learning controversy returned to the headlines: local law enforcement deploying Amazon's Rekognition, a computer vision service with facial recognition capabilities. In a letter addressed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, 19 groups of shareholders expressed concerns that Rekognition's facial recognition capabilities will be misused in ways that "violate [the] civil and human rights" of "people of color, immigrants, and civil society organizations." And they said that it set the stage for sales of the software to foreign governments and authoritarian regimes. Amazon, for its part, said in a statement that it will "suspend … customer's right to use … services [like Rekognition]" if it determines those services are being "abused." It has so far declined, however, to define the bright-line rules that would trigger a suspension.