October: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence - Connected World

AI that discriminates or perpetuates real-life gender or racial bias, however, must be addressed. There is currently a lot of academic work on studying how bias can arise in AI systems and developing methodologies for mitigating bias or adjusting standard AI algorithms to be more equitable. Angela Zhou, a PhD student at Cornell Tech in operations research and information engineering, is one of many bright minds in training looking into how ethics and AI intersect. "There are many ethical concerns raised by AI," Zhou says. "When AI is being used to direct decisionmaking, in particular in settings where there previously was human oversight or human decisions--whether it be caseworkers in social services or doctors in the healthcare setting--many might find it objectionable to be subject to decisions arising from algorithms rather than humans. Yet this requires deeply understanding and characterizing potential'tradeoffs'. While humans may have access to expert training in certain domains and have developed expertise in certain areas, AI tools offer consistency and the ability to make sense of statistical patterns in incomprehensibly complex or voluminous data."