As debates about the policy and ethical implications of AI systems grow, it will be increasingly important to accurately locate who is responsible when agency is distributed in a system and control over an action is mediated through time and space. Analyzing several high-profile accidents involving complex and automated socio-technical systems and the media coverage that surrounded them, I introduce the concept of a moral crumple zone to describe how responsibility for an action may be misattributed to a human actor who had limited control over the behavior of an automated or autonomous system. Just as the crumple zone in a car is designed to absorb the force of impact in a crash, the human in a highly complex and automated system may become simply a component--accidentally or intentionally--that bears the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions. While the crumple zone in a car is meant to protect the human driver, the moral crumple zone protects the integrity of the technological system, at the expense of the nearest human operator. The concept is both a challenge to and an opportunity for the design and regulation of human-robot systems.

As artificial intelligence proliferates, companies and governments are aggregating enormous data sets to feed their AI initiatives. Although privacy is not a new concept in computing, the growth of aggregated data magnifies privacy challenges and leads to extreme ethical risks such as unintentionally building biased AI systems, among many others. Privacy and artificial intelligence are both complex topics. There are no easy or simple answers because solutions lie at the shifting and conflicted intersection of technology, commercial profit, public policy, and even individual and cultural attitudes. Given this complexity, I invited two brilliant people to share their thoughts in a CXOTALK conversation on privacy and AI.

The real breakthrough of self-driving cars (IMO) A short and personal essay about my thoughts on self-driving cars and when we shall see its true power Scritto da Sebastian Zdrojewski, pubblicato il 04/12/2016 12:52 As technology goes by and develops, we are seeing more and more improvements on our streets every day. Since the development of the first steam powered car in 1769 capable of human transportation we've seen about two and half centuries of development in terms of design, engineering and safety. The past ten years were about as much intense as the past centuries whereas we've seen more and more automation and new technologies kicking in. One of the most exciting, from my perspective, is the self-driving feature. The following video is the one that inspired me about the thought of this post, and it is a real world test of the Tesla Self-Driving Car.