How to create space for ethics in AI

In a year that has seen decades' worth of global shocks, bad news, and scandals squeezed into 12 excruciatingly long months, the summer already feels like a distant memory. In August 2020, the world was in the throes of a major social and racial justice movement, and I argued hopefully in VentureBeat that the term "ethical AI" was finally starting to mean something. It was not the observation of a disinterested observer but an optimistic vision for coalescing the ethical AI community around notions of power, justice, and structural change. Yet in the intervening months it has proven to be, at best, an overly simplistic vision, and at worst, a naive one. The piece critiqued "second wave" ethical AI as being preoccupied with technical fixes to problems of bias and fairness in machine learning.