Ryan Carrier founded ForHumanity after a 25 year career in finance. His global business experience, risk management expertise and unique perspective on how to manage the risk led him to launch the non-profit entity, ForHumanity, personally. Ryan focused on Independent Audit of AI Systems as one means to mitigate the risk associated with artificial intelligence and began to build the business model associated a first-of-its-kind process for auditing corporate AIs, using a globally, open-source, crowd-sourced process to determine "best-practices". Ryan serves as ForHumanity's Executive Director and Chairman of the Board of Directors, in these roles he is responsible for the day-to-day function of ForHumanity and the overall process of Independent Audit. Prior to founding ForHumanity, Ryan owned and operated Nautical Capital, a quantitative hedge fund which employed artificial intelligence algorithms.

Hosted by Ben Byford, The Machine Ethics Podcast brings together interviews with academics, authors, business leaders, designers and engineers on the subject of autonomous algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology's impact on society. This episode we're chatting with Ryan Carrier about the positivity of the ForHumanity community, being compelled to do something about AI technologies' negative impact, AI audits, and topics including trust, oversight, governance, privacy, cyber security, bias, creating an infrastructure of trust, disclosing found risks and the ethical decisions, the new industry of AI audits, human wellbeing as the whole point of business, and more… Ryan Carrier founded ForHumanity after a 25 year career in finance. His global business experience, risk management expertise and unique perspective on how to manage risk led him to launch the non-profit entity, ForHumanity, personally. Ryan focused on Independent Audit of AI Systems as one means to mitigate the risk associated with artificial intelligence and began to build the business model associated a first-of-its-kind process for auditing corporate AIs, using a globally, open-source, crowd-sourced process to determine "best-practices". Ryan serves as ForHumanity's Executive Director and Chairman of the Board of Directors.

New evidence of voice recognition's racial bias problem has emerged. Speech recognition technologies developed by Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and IBM make almost twice as many errors when transcribing African American voices as they do with white American voices, according to a new Stanford study. All five systems produced these error rates even when the speakers were of the same gender and age, and saying the exact same words. We can't know for sure if these technologies are used in virtual assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, as none of the companies disclose this information. If they are, the products will be offering a vastly inferior service to a huge chunk of their users -- which can have a major impact on their daily lives.

Governance and independent oversight on the design and implementation of all forms of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation is a cresting wave about to break comprehensively on the field of information technology and computing. If this is a surprise to you, then you may have missed the forest for the trees on a myriad of news stories over the past three to five years. Privacy failures, cybersecurity breeches, unethical choices in decision engines, and biased datasets have repeatedly sprung up as corporations around the world deploy increasing numbers of AIs throughout their organizations. The world, broadly speaking, combined with legislative bodies, regulators, and a dedicated body of academics operating in the field of AI Safety, have been pressing the issue. Now guidelines are taking hold in a practical format.

For months I have regularly tweeted a response to my colleagues in the AI Safety community about being a supporter of independent audit, but recently it has become clear to me that I have insufficiently explained how this works and why it is so powerful. This blog will attempt to do that. Unfortunately it is likely be longer than my typical blog, so apologies in advance. ForHumanity, or similar entity, that exists, not for profit, but for the benefit of humanity would conduct detailed, transparent and iterative audits on all developers of AI. The criteria that is analysed is important, but it is not the most important aspect of independent audit.