Artificial Intelligence (AI) especially machine learning is a technology that is spreading rapidly around the world.
AI will become a standard tool to help steer cars, improve medical care or automate decision making within public authorities. Although intelligent technologies are drivers of innovation and growth, the global proliferation of them is already causing serious harm in its wake.
Last month, a leaked white paper showed that the European Union is considering putting a temporary ban on facial recognition technologies in public spaces until the potential risks are better understood.
But many AI technologies in addition to facial recognition warrant more concern, especially from European policymakers.
More and more experts have scrutinised the threat that 'Deep Fake' technologies may pose to democracy by enabling artificial disinformation; or consider the Apple Credit Card which grants much higher credit scores to husbands when compared to their wives, even though they share assets.
Global companies, governments, and international organisations have reacted to these worrying trends by creating AI ethics boards, charters, committees, guidelines, etcetera, all to address the problems this technology presents - and Europe is no exception.
The European Commission set up a High Level Expert Group on AI to draft guidelines on ethical AI.
Unfortunately, an ethical debate alone will not help to remedy the destruction caused by the rapid spread of AI into diverse facets of life.
The latest example of this shortcoming is Microsoft, one of the largest producers of AI-driven services in the world.
Microsoft, who has often tried to set itself apart from its Big Tech counterparts as being a moral leader, has recently taken heat for its substantial investment in facial recognition software that is used for surveillance purposes.
"AnyVision" is allegedly being used by Israel to track Palestinians in the West Bank. Although investing in this technology goes directly against Microsoft's own declared ethical principles on facial recognition, there is no redress.
It goes to show that governing AI - especially exported technologies or those deployed across borders - through ethical principles does not work.
The case with Microsoft is only a drop in the bucket.
Numerous cases will continue to pop up or be uncovered in the coming years in all corners of the globe given a functioning and free press, of course.
This problem is especially prominent with facial recognition software, as the European debate reflects. Developed in Big Tech, facial recognition products have been procured by government agencies such as customs and migration officers, police officers, security forces, the military, and more.
This is true for many regions of the world: like in America, the UK, as well as several states in Africa, Asia, and more.
Promising more effective and accurate methods to keep the peace, law enforcement agencies have adopted the use of AI to super-charge their capabilities.
This comes with specific dangers, though, which is shown in numerous reports from advocacy groups and watchdogs saying that the technologies are flawed and deliver more false matches disproportionately for women and darker skin tones.
If law enforcement agencies know that these technologies have the potential to be more harmful to subjects who are more often vulnerable and marginalised, then there should be adequate standards for implementing facial recognition in such sensitive areas.
Ethical guidelines neither those coming from Big Tech nor those coming from international stakeholders are not sufficient to safeguard citizens from invasive, biased, or harmful practices of police or security forces.
Although these problems have surrounded AI technologies in previous years, this has not yet resulted in a successful regulation to make AI "good" or "ethical" terms that mean well but are incredibly hard to define, especially on an international level.
This is why, even though actors from private sector, government, academia, and civil society have all been calling for ethical guidelines in AI development, these discussions remain vague, open to interpretation, non-universal, and most importantly, unenforceable.
In order to stop the faster-is-better paradigm of AI development and remedy some of the societal harm already caused, we need to establish rules for the use of AI that are reliable and enforceable.
And arguments founded in ethics are not strong enough to do so; ethical principles fail to address these harms in a concrete way.
As long as we lack rules that work, we should at least use guidelines that already exist to protect vulnerable societies to the best of our abilities. This is where the international human rights legal framework could be instrumental.
We should be discussing these undue harms as violations of human rights, utilising international legal frameworks and language that has far-reaching consensus across different nations and cultural contexts, is grounded in consistent rhetoric, and is in theory enforceable.
AI development needs to promote and respect human rights of individuals everywhere, not continue to harm society at a growing pace and scale.
There should be baseline standards in AI technologies, which are compliant with human rights.
Documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Guiding Principles which steer private sector behaviour in human-rights compliant ways need to set the bar internationally.
This is where the EU could lead by example.
By refocusing on these existing conventions and principles, Microsoft's investment in AnyVision, for example, would be seen as not only a direct violation of its internal principles, but also as a violation of the UN Guiding Principles, forcing the international community to scrutinise the company's business activities more deeply and systematically, ideally leading to redress.
Faster is not better. Fast development and dissemination of AI systems has led to unprecedented and irreversible damages to individuals all over the world. AI does, indeed, provide huge potential to revolutionise and enhance products and services, and this potential should be harnessed in a way that benefits everyone.
More:
Why EU will find it difficult to legislate on AI - EUobserver
- Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software environments for working on AI projects - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of my NLP toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Java FastTag part of speech tagger is now released under the LGPL - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Defining AI and Knowledge Engineering - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Great Overview of Knowledge Representation - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Something like Google page rank for semantic web URIs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My experiences writing AI software for vehicle control in games and virtual reality systems - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The URL for this blog has changed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- I have a new page on Knowledge Management - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- N-GRAM analysis using Ruby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Good video: Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using the PowerLoom reasoning system with JRuby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Machines Like Us - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- RapidMiner machine learning, data mining, and visualization tool - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- texai.org - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My OpenCalais Ruby client library - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ruby API for accessing Freebase/Metaweb structured data - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Protégé OWL Ontology Editor - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of Numenta software is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Very nice: Elsevier IJCAI AI Journal articles now available for free as PDFs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Verison 2.0 of OpenCyc is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What’s Your Biggest Question about Artificial Intelligence? [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Minimax Search [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Tree [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- More AI Content & Format Preference Poll [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New Planners Solve Rescue Missions [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Learns to Bluff at Poker [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pushing the Limits of Game AI Technology [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mining Data for the Netflix Prize [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Making for Medical Support [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Creates Music CD [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- jKilavuz - a guide in the polygon soup [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Apply AI 2007 Roundtable Report [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What Would You do With 80 Cores? [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software Finds Learning Language Child's Play [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence in Games [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence Resources - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist? - April 25th, 2012 [April 25th, 2012]
- BBC Horizon: The Hunt for AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Can computers have true artificial intelligence" Masonic handshake" 3rd-April-2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Kevin B. Korb - Interview - Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity p3 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence - 6 Month Anniversary - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Science Breakthroughs - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Hitman: Blood Money - Part 49 - Stupid Artificial Intelligence! - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Research Members Turned Off By HAARP Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence Lecture No. 5 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Charlie Rose - Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Expert on artificial intelligence to speak at EPIIC Nights dinner - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Filipino software engineers complete and best thousands on Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Vodafone xone™ Hackathon Challenges Developers and Entrepreneurs to Build a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence ... - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- 2 Filipinos finishes among top in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- 2 Pinoy software engineers complete Stanford's AI course - May 7th, 2012 [May 7th, 2012]
- Percipio Media, LLC Proudly Accepts Partnership With MIT's Prestigious Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence ... - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Google Driverless Car Ok'd by Nevada - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research Announce Free Webinar - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Wins 2012 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Award - May 13th, 2012 [May 13th, 2012]
- Internet Week 2012: Rocket Fuel to Speak at OMMA RTB - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- How to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads -- Rocket Fuel's VP of Products, Eshwar Belani, to Lead MarketingProfs ... - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- The Digital Disruptor To Banking Has Just Gone International - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel Announce Free Webinar Featuring an Independent Research Firm - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- MASA Showcases Latest Version of MASA SWORD for Homeland Security Markets - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Bluesky Launches Drones for Aerial Surveying - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines? - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- Bubble Robots Move Using Lasers [VIDEO] - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- UHV assistant professors receive $10,000 summer research grants - May 27th, 2012 [May 27th, 2012]
- Artificial intelligence: science fiction or simply science? - May 28th, 2012 [May 28th, 2012]
- Exetel taps artificial intelligence - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- Software offers brain on the rain - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- New Dean of Science has high hopes for his faculty - May 30th, 2012 [May 30th, 2012]
- Cognitive Code Announces "Silvia For Android" App - May 31st, 2012 [May 31st, 2012]
- A Rat is Smarter Than Google - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]