A San Francisco-based startup called Credo AI is emerging from stealth and helping companies manage the regulatory and ethical risks of their …

Machine learning engineer Ari Font was worried about the future of Twitter's algorithms. It was mid-2020, and the leader of the team researching ethics and accountability for the company's ML had just left Twitter. For Font, the future of the ethics research was unclear. Font was the manager of Twitter's machine learning platforms teams -- part of Twitter Cortex, the company's central ML organization -- at the time, but she believed that ethics research could transform the way Twitter relies on machine learning. She'd always felt that algorithmic accountability and ethics should shape not just how Twitter used algorithms, but all practical AI applications.

You've likely already encountered artificial intelligence several times today. But for most people, the term AI still conjures images of The Terminator. We don't need to worry about hulking armed robots terrorizing American cities, but there are serious ethical and societal issues we must confront quickly -- because the next wave of computing power is coming, with the potential to dramatically alter -- and improve -- the human experience. Full disclosure: I am general counsel and chair of the AI Ethics Working Group at a company that is bringing AI to processor technology in trillions of devices to make them smarter and more trustworthy. Enabled by high-speed wireless capacity and rapid advances in machine learning, new applications for artificial intelligence are created every day. But for the rest of us, we're right to ask a few questions.