Category - AI

Don’t we have to balance the economic benefits of AI innovation against the harms?

  • Date: November 13, 2021
  • Categories: Economics
If we believe that humanity has a dignity that is conferred upon it along with “rights”, implicit in the US Declaration of Independence, 1776 and the 1948 United Nations universal Declaration of Human Rights, then preventing harms to the dignity and rights of humankind must trump economic benefits. Fundamental to this position is clarity about what it means to be a human being and the harms that AI can do to our personhood (see FAQ - How do some applications of AI harm humanity).
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What is “data altruism” and will it make AI better?

  • Date: November 13, 2021
  • Categories: Data
In a bid to increase the amount of data available in Europe to compete with Asia and America, the European Commission introduced the idea of “data altruism”. Commissioner Thierry Breton has stated: "With the ever-growing role of industrial data in our economy, Europe needs an open yet sovereign single market for data,". Europe’s proposed Data Governance Act will allow business and research organisations to tap the potential of such vast data volumes.
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Won’t data lakes make AI more trustworthy?

  • Date: November 13, 2021
  • Categories: Data
A data lake is simply a large repository of data that is unstructured and un analysed that can receive contributions from many different sources, whether structured data from business processes or unstructured data from the Internet of Things (IoT) and social media. Users of the data can examine and sample whatever they want. Businesses that have used data lakes have been shown to improve organic sales growth by 9% by being able to perform better data analytics on their data (Lock).
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Why do we need a Bill of Digital Rights?

The UN Human Rights Charter and the US Declaration of Independence do not adequately define what inalienable rights are, especially in the context of modern technology and its impact on human nature. The idea of a Bill of Digital Rights would be to define the fundamental rights that humans should have in the digital world in which we now live.
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Will a bill of Digital Rights protect us?

A bill of digital rights could go a long way to protect humanity, but only if it is framed carefully and with a full understanding of what it means to be a human being with a clearly defined set of harms that AI applications can cause human beings.
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Isn’t legislation the enemy of innovation?

Unfortunately some innovations can harm humanity, for example -l drugs and vaccines have to be trialled and approved by a regulator to protect the population. Modern synthetic drugs are an “innovation” but result in addiction so in many states they are criminalised. We usually accept the need for regulation in such areas. 
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