Artificial intelligence is nowhere near good enough to address problems facing content moderation on Facebook, according to whistleblower Frances Haugen. Haugen appeared at an event in London Tuesday evening with Daniel Motaung, a former Facebook moderator who is suing the company in Kenya accusing it of human trafficking. Meta has praised the efficacy of its AI systems in the past. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told a Congressional hearing in March 2021 the company relies on AI to weed out over 95% of "hate speech content." In February this year Zuckerberg said the company wants to get its AI to a "human level" of intelligence.

Can technology affect human morality? This is not an esoteric test question from a college philosophy class, but a real, growing concern among leading technologists and thinkers. Technologies like social media, smartphones, and artificial intelligence can create moral issues at scale, and technology experts specifically and society generally are struggling to navigate these issues. On the one hand, technology can empower us with better information on the consequences of our actions, as when we use the Internet to research how to reduce our environmental footprint. In the past, such information may have been inaccessible or impossible to source, but today we can easily arm ourselves with data that helps us make choices we perceive to be more moral.

A year ago I found out, from one of my direct reports, that I had apparently resigned. I had just been fired from Google in one of the most disrespectful ways I could imagine. Thanks to organizing done by former and current Google employees and many others, Google did not succeed in smearing my work or reputation, although they tried. My firing made headlines because of the worker organizing that has been building up in the tech world, often due to the labor of people who are already marginalized, many of whose names we do not know. Since I was fired last December, there have been many developments in tech worker organizing and whistleblowing.

Facebook announced it is pulling the plug on its facial recognition system and will delete the faceprints of over one billion users, as the company tries to rebound from a public relations crisis spawned by whistle-blower revelations that it knew how harmful its products are but did not take meaningful steps to fix them. "The many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole," wrote Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebook's new parent company, Meta, in a blog post on Tuesday. "There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use," he added. "Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate." For years, activists and academics have raised concerns that algorithms underpinning facial recognition programmes are racially biased and can be used to target black and brown people, fuel inequality and exacerbate social injustice.

Frances Haugen was part of the first wave of people to use Google back in 1996. Her mother, a faculty member at the University of Iowa1, showed her the search engine, which was still a research project at Stanford University. Haugen was blown away at what Larry Page and Sergey Brin had built. "The idea that you could actually peer into a giant mountain of data was amazing," she says. Haugen has been obsessed with search technology ever since.

Within five years, the virtual assistants on smartphones -- such as Siri or Cortana -- should be able to talk to a refrigerator, a car or anything else that can be connected to the internet. A virtual assistant could ask a car to check its own oil and tell the owner if it's time for an oil change. It could figure out how to fix a broken dishwasher by contacting the virtual assistant for that dishwasher's manufacturer. It could tell the coffee pot to brew a morning cup of joe. That's the vision Andrea Sahli, senior implementation manager at noHold, presented Thursday during the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.