In recent years, there have been tremendous advances in artificial intelligence (AI). These rapid technological advances are raising a myriad of ethical issues, and much work remains to be done in thinking through all of these ethical issues. I am delighted to be interviewing Kurt Long about the topic of AI. Long is the creator and CEO of FairWarning, a cloud-based security provider that provides data protection and governance for electronic health records, Salesforce, Office 365, and many other cloud applications. Long has extensive experience with AI and has thought a lot about its ethical ramifications.

"Every aspect of our lives will be transformed. In short, success in creating AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization." From self-driving vehicles to virtual assistants, artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving at a rapid pace. It has the potential for tremendous good – IBM's Watson improving cancer treatment with genomic sequencing as an example. Additionally, AI has been used to bring new art into the world – "Symphonologie" is an orchestra piece created with the help of AI.

MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson provides his learned perspective on the future of U.S. productivity in a recent Bloomberg podcast, "54: The Optimist's Guide to the Economy." Given the widely-held belief that "U.S. productivity growth has stagnated and the economy has been unable to break out of 2 percent expansion," Professor Brynjolfsson explains why he thinks the current wave of advances in technology means we don't have to worry about stagnation. Below are excerpts from Professor Brynjolfsson and "The Optimist's Guide to the Economy:" Opening Thoughts I think much better days are ahead of us. And my optimism comes not from extrapolating what happened with productivity recently. It comes from going out and visiting companies. The Promise of Artificial Intelligence When we [co-author Andrew McAfee] wrote the book [The Second Machine Age, 2014], humans could see better than machines; now, in many tasks, machines are much better, for instance at recognizing street signs or interpreting images in big databases like ImageNet.

In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, Microsoft Principal Researcher Kate Crawford discusses what she sees as the a very real problem with artificial intelligence today: "Sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination are being built into the machine-learning algorithms that underlie the technology behind many "intelligent" systems that shape how we are categorized and advertised to." Below are a few excerpts from "Artificial Intelligence's White Guy Problem." Police departments across the United States are also deploying data-driven risk-assessment tools in "predictive policing" crime prevention efforts. In many cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami, software analyses of large sets of historical crime data are used to forecast where crime hot spots are most likely to emerge; the police are then directed to those areas. At the very least, this software risks perpetuating an already vicious cycle, in which the police increase their presence in the same places they are already policing (or overpolicing), thus ensuring that more arrests come from those areas.