Why bias is the biggest threat to AI development

Bias – both human and data-based – is the biggest ethical challenge facing the development and adoption of artificial intelligence, according to a panel of world-leading AI luminaries. Speaking at last week's Dreamforce conference, Salesforce chief scientist and adjunct professor of Stanford's computer science department, Dr Richard Socher, said the rapid development of AI will inevitably impact more and more people's lives, raising significant ethical concerns. "These algorithms can change elections for the worse, or spread misinformation," he told attendees. "In some benign natural language processing classification algorithms, for example, you may want to maximise the number of clicks, and find something with a terminator image has more clicks so you put more of those pictures in articles." But it is the bias coming through existing datasets being used to train AI algorithms that arguably presents the biggest ethical problem facing industries.