The fear that robots are taking over the world might not be that far-fetched. While artificial intelligence is praised for its responsiveness to expansive amounts of information, AI seems to be absorbing biases, too. An experiment published in June demonstrated that robots trained with artificial intelligence exhibited racism and sexism in their decision-making. While sorting through billion of images, robots in this experiment routinely categorized Black men as "criminals." Similarly, the label "homemaker" was given to women more regularly than it was given to men.

After three years speaking about, writing about and training in AI Ethics, organizations I speak with report that many of the students come back with a good understanding of the elements and remedies for ethical issues. But they continue to work as before. Part of the problem is the use of the term "ethics." It's too ineffable for most people to grasp. Some groups have tried "trustworthy."

Ethics in machine learning are what comes to mind when we imagine a worst case scenario in the context of artificial intelligence. As an example, we can think of HAL 9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey' and Skynet from the'Terminator' films or more recently Ultron from the'Avengers'. Sadly, the main thinking behind most of the depicted self aware artificial intelligences is that they become sentient with the sole purpose of destroying the human race to ensure its survival. While such a scenario is not impossible or thankfully a ways off from this type of dystopian future. There are however pressing ethical matters in AI that we need to be considering right now.

Do companies need to hire dedicated data science ethicists? Could a philosophy degree become a hot commodity in the world of data science? There is a startling amount of data generated every day – around 2.5 quintillion bytes, according to software company Domo. In 2017, 456,000 tweets were sent per minute. This rate of generation will likely only rise in tandem with the breathless pace at which the internet is expanding.