INTERVIEW
AI and bots can create a fairer world
Rob Mackinlay talks to ethical technologist Kriti Sharma about AI and the need to create ethical frameworks around data, inherent biases in datasets and why technologists need to be open to ideas from philosophy and the social sciences.
“I’M a trained computer scientist and all my degrees and all my jobs have been in computing. But I went through my entire education process and much of my career without ever hearing about ethics, even though technology impacts society in so many ways,” says Kriti Sharma, a United Nations Young Leaders For Sustainable Development Goals. Kriti, who is also the founder of AI for Good, a social enterprise that uses artifi cial intelligence to tackle social issues, will be delivering a keynote speech at CILIP Conference 2019. Her experience in the tech world has convinced her that it can’t exist in a bubble, “We should be teaching philosophy and social sciences to technologists from the beginning because it’s so powerful, and impacts the world in many diff erent ways. I’ve had to re-educate myself. I’ve had to really understand what non-geek speak looks like. And I think it’s a responsibility of the technology industry to be more open and explain what we do a lot better.”
Digital addiction
Powerful as it is, one of the problems is that artifi cial intelligence is not aimed at the worthiest of the world’s problems. “Today, if you look at the very successful AI applica- tions at scale they are in the fi eld of making people click more ads. There’s a lot about
20 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Rob Mackinlay (@cilip_reporter2,
rob.mackinlay@
cilip.org.uk) is Journalist, Information Professional.
driving digital addiction, where content is designed to get your attention. And it’s making people buy more products saying: ‘If you’re interested in this then maybe you would like this’ and ‘people like you bought this’.
“But there’s an opportunity to solve social justice issues using this technology. That’s where I would love to see more action going forward, beyond these fi elds, to see society and the technology industry mature to a point where we would focus on wider prob- lems. This technology could be used to drive behaviour change, changing our pathways to the information that we are exposed to. This combination of behavioural science and machine learning is a real example of
March 2019
Kriti Sharma
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07/03/2019 12:11
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