Tuesday, December 20, 2016

2016/12/20 - A Scary World

We live in a scary world. A world where corporate and government agencies have equations to learn more about you. They have algorithms that try to figure out if you could be a terrorist, or learn your political and religious affiliations. They figure out what products you might want to buy and ads for you to receive. They may determine if you are a credit risk, or a health risk. They can influence your entrance into a job, a university, or your release from prision.

But for me the scary part is that some of these equations have gotten so complicated that they are impossible for humans to understand and the results from these black box algorithms may not agree with the moral and ethical values of our society.

I just listened to a great TED talk given on the subject by Zeynep Tufekci titled "Machine intelligence makes human morals more important". Two quotes stuck out for me:

"Artificial intelligence does not give us an a Get-out-of-ethics-free card".

"We cannot outsource our moral responsibilities to machines."

Later,
Steve

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