The IEEE Standards Association has released a report calling for engineers to consider the impact their work will have on climate change, children, and society. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is one of the largest organizations for computer scientists in the world. With hundreds of thousands of members, the group undertakes initiatives to create common standards and often consults organizations like the European Commission and OECD on matters of ethics and design principles. "It is imperative to move beyond business as usual and to prioritize the well-being of our children, starting with protecting their privacy and security online. If we fail to do this, their agency, mental health, and self-actualization as humans in any culture will be reliant on forces beyond their control," reads the report titled "Measuring What Matters in the Era of Global Warming and the Age of Algorithmic Promises." The whitepaper encapsulates change already underway at the IEEE that's in line with AI ethics principles released in spring 2019 after years of work, according to John Havens, director of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous & Intelligent Systems.

PISCATAWAY, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, and the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) today announced the launch of the Ethics Certification Program for Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (ECPAIS). ECPAIS establishes one of the world's first programs dedicated to the creation of an A/IS certification process and marking methodology supported by a global standards development organization. ECPAIS intends to offer a process and define a series of marks by which organizations can seek certified A/IS products, systems and services. The program is highlighting the importance of public-private collaboration in advancing responsible use of A/IS, and launching with founding member organizations including Saidot.ai, Participation is open to all interested entities.

Facebook's news feed has recently been taken to task for the explosion of "fake news" that can have real consequences. Music curation has moved from record labels and radio stations to increasingly AI-based algorithms. We are all accustomed to this intrusion of machine intelligence into our lives over the past decade -- systems watching our behavior and trying to infer what we want, and then combining such information with that from other sources so as to create a complex consumer profile that is valuable to advertisers. What happens when the next generation of intelligent systems mediate our environments completely? Or, more to the point, what happens when we delegate the curation of all aspects of our lives, as well as the actual physical appearance of the world, to a pervasive network that learns about us and continually adapts to our needs and desires?