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The State of AI Ethics Report (January 2021)

Gupta, Abhishek, Royer, Alexandrine, Wright, Connor, Khan, Falaah Arif, Heath, Victoria, Galinkin, Erick, Khurana, Ryan, Ganapini, Marianna Bergamaschi, Fancy, Muriam, Sweidan, Masa, Akif, Mo, Butalid, Renjie

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The 3rd edition of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute's The State of AI Ethics captures the most relevant developments in AI Ethics since October 2020. It aims to help anyone, from machine learning experts to human rights activists and policymakers, quickly digest and understand the field's ever-changing developments. Through research and article summaries, as well as expert commentary, this report distills the research and reporting surrounding various domains related to the ethics of AI, including: algorithmic injustice, discrimination, ethical AI, labor impacts, misinformation, privacy, risk and security, social media, and more. In addition, The State of AI Ethics includes exclusive content written by world-class AI Ethics experts from universities, research institutes, consulting firms, and governments. Unique to this report is "The Abuse and Misogynoir Playbook," written by Dr. Katlyn Tuner (Research Scientist, Space Enabled Research Group, MIT), Dr. Danielle Wood (Assistant Professor, Program in Media Arts and Sciences; Assistant Professor, Aeronautics and Astronautics; Lead, Space Enabled Research Group, MIT) and Dr. Catherine D'Ignazio (Assistant Professor, Urban Science and Planning; Director, Data + Feminism Lab, MIT). The piece (and accompanying infographic), is a deep-dive into the historical and systematic silencing, erasure, and revision of Black women's contributions to knowledge and scholarship in the United Stations, and globally. Exposing and countering this Playbook has become increasingly important following the firing of AI Ethics expert Dr. Timnit Gebru (and several of her supporters) at Google. This report should be used not only as a point of reference and insight on the latest thinking in the field of AI Ethics, but should also be used as a tool for introspection as we aim to foster a more nuanced conversation regarding the impacts of AI on the world.


The ethical questions that haunt facial-recognition research

Nature

In September 2019, four researchers wrote to the publisher Wiley to "respectfully ask" that it immediately retract a scientific paper. The study, published in 2018, had trained algorithms to distinguish faces of Uyghur people, a predominantly Muslim minority ethnic group in China, from those of Korean and Tibetan ethnicity1. China had already been internationally condemned for its heavy surveillance and mass detentions of Uyghurs in camps in the northwestern province of Xinjiang -- which the government says are re-education centres aimed at quelling a terrorist movement. According to media reports, authorities in Xinjiang have used surveillance cameras equipped with software attuned to Uyghur faces. As a result, many researchers found it disturbing that academics had tried to build such algorithms -- and that a US journal had published a research paper on the topic. And the 2018 study wasn't the only one: journals from publishers including Springer Nature, Elsevier and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) had also published peer-reviewed papers that describe using facial recognition to identify Uyghurs and members of other Chinese minority groups. The complaint, which launched an ongoing investigation, was one foray in a growing push by some scientists and human-rights activists to get the scientific community to take a firmer stance against unethical facial-recognition research.


Z.til

AI Classics

This paper describes some work on automatically generating finite counterexamples in topology, and the use of counterexamples to speed up proof discovery in intermediate analysis, and gives some examples theorems where human provers are aided in proof discovery by the use of examples.


ETHICS

AI Classics

The notion of an ethical machine can be interpreted in more than one way. Perhaps the most important interpretation is a machine that can generalize from existing literature to infer one or more consistent ethical systems and can work out their consequences. An ultra-intelligent machine should be able to do this, and that is one reason for not fearing it. INTRODUCTION There is fear that'the machine will become the master', especially compounded by the possibility that the machine will go wrong. There is, for example, a play by E. M. Foster based on this theme.