The ethics of artificial intelligence will be critical to the success of AI going forward, a Microsoft leader and a keynote speaker at the AI Day event in Auckland next week says. Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Microsoft's AI Business, says that given AI has the potential to reshape not just industries and governments, but society as a whole. "Working on the ethics of the use of AI, from the beginning, in key areas like transparency, accountability, privacy and bias will be crucial to the success of AI going forward. "There is a strong focus on the ethical implications of the AI systems that are being built and deployed." The European Commission's group on ethics in science and new technologies recently warned that existing efforts to develop solutions to the ethical, societal and legal challenges AI presents are a'patchwork of disparate initiatives'. It added that uncoordinated, unbalanced approaches in the regulation of AI risked ethics shopping, resulting in the relocation of AI development and use to regions with lower ethical standards. AI Day on March 28 is being organised by NewZealand.AI and the AI Forum NZ, which is part of the NZTech Alliance, bringing together 14 national tech communities, more than 500 organisations and more than 100,000 employees to help create a more prosperous New Zealand underpinned by technology. Guggenheimer says one important element around the adoption of AI is the focus on having AI help to amplify human capabilities and allow them to do more versus simply replacing people and functions. "As AI is adopted by various organisations we are starting to see a few trends occurring.

Don't expect Microsoft's consumer software to hype its artificial-intelligence features. For the most part, the AI smarts are under the hood. "If you do a good job infusing AI into your products, your customers don't know you've done that. The products just work better," Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft's corporate vice president for AI business, told attendees at the AI NextCon conference here today. "You don't actually go do a bunch of advertising and say, 'Office, Now With AI!' That's not how it works." But rest assured, it's there.

For years, the Microsoft stand at CES was the anchor of the giant central hall. As soon as you came through the doors, there it was, opposite Intel. The year that Microsoft had Kinect games on the stand, the traffic jam of people playing, waiting to play, or just watching brought the front of the hall to a standstill. The Microsoft stand was where I first met Microsoft's genius scientist Steven Bathiche, showing off the Sidewinder gaming keyboard that solved n-key rollover for gamers -- and which paved the way to the detachable Surface keyboards using the same cheap optical sensors. But even though Microsoft now makes its own hardware, it no longer has a flashy stand at CES.