Three Steps to Guide the Rise of AI and Share Its Benefits

Vivienne Ming, a theoretical neuroscientist and cofounder of Socos Labs in Berkeley, California, defines artificial intelligence (AI) as "any autonomous and artificial system that can make a decision under uncertainty and make expert human judgements cheaper, faster, and increasingly, in some domains, better than a human can." AI has already been widely applied across business, social, and government sectors. But if it's not applied carefully, AI can lead to distorted results or decisions and potentially exclude historically marginalized or underrepresented populations. On a recent episode of the Urban Institute's podcast, Critical Value, Ming discusses three approaches to minimize the risk of AI supporting problematic or biased outcomes. If AI is trained on biased data and learns from biased samples, the system can reproduce bias that originated from discriminatory human decisions and practices.