I took part in the first panel at the BSI conference The Digital World: Artificial Intelligence. The subject of the panel was AI Governance and Ethics. My co-panelist was Emma Carmel, and we were expertly chaired by Katherine Holden. Emma and I each gave short opening presentations prior to the Q&A. The title of my talk was Why is Ethical Governance in AI so hard?

By the end of 2019, it is estimated that there will be more than 5 billion mobile phone users in the world -- more people than have access to a flushing toilet. That figure emphasizes the extent to which technology affects humanity and gives us an idea of how many people are interacting with algorithms that fall under the umbrella of artificial intelligence. While this technology can be valuable and beneficial, increasing and high-profile instances of misuse have seriously undermined public trust. Even permitted usage, such as the application of AI and algorithmic decision-making to real-world outcomes such as insurance, immigration and medicine, can lead to highly problematic outcomes. In 2018, Amazon's recruitment algorithm -- built to ensure that Amazon was finding the people most likely to do well at the company -- made headlines for deselecting women's CVs.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. This week my colleague Dieter Vanderelst presented our paper: "The Dark Side of Ethical Robots" at AIES 2018 in New Orleans. I blogged about Dieter's very elegant experiment here, but let me summarize. With two NAO robots he set up a demonstration of an ethical robot helping another robot acting as a proxy human, then showed that with a very simple alteration of the ethical robot's logic it is transformed into a distinctly unethical robot--behaving either competitively or aggressively toward the proxy human.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the use of computer systems to perform tasks normally done by humans. Our smartphones are packed with the most common AI applications. Visual perception: When I point my smartphone at myself with my family for a picture, a set of computational rules (called an algorithm) identifies our faces by marking them with boxes and makes sure we are all in focus. The phone takes the picture when I raise my hand. Speech recognition: When I wanted to buy sourdough to go with the clam chowder I was planning to cook for my family, I asked Google through the microphone "Where can I buy sourdough in Pasig?"