AI & Society Articles - The Batch

Andrew Ng and other speakers at the NeurIPS 2019 conference

Letters

NeurIPS Grows Up

I’ve been reflecting on the NeurIPS 2019 conference, which ended on Saturday. It’s always a wonderful event, but this year I found it a bittersweet experience. Bitter because the conference has grown so much that we no longer focus on...

Tech & Society

Neighborhood Watchers: Reports charge Ring with mishandling customer data.

Smart doorbell maker Ring has built its business by turning neighborhoods into surveillance networks. Now the company is drawing fire for using private data without informing customers and sharing data with police.

Tech & Society

Fighting Fakes: China introduces a ban on deepfakes.

China announced a ban on fake news, targeting deepfakes in particular. The Cyberspace Administration of China issued new rules restricting online audio and video, especially content created using AI.

Tech & Society

Transparency for Military AI: National Security Commission on AI required to share info

A U.S. federal judge ruled that the public must be able to see records from a government-chartered AI advisory group. The court decided that the National Security Commission on AI, which guides defense research into AI-powered warfighting technology, must respond to freedom-of-information requests.

Letters

AI Ethics Must Be Actionable

I’ve been thinking about AI and ethics. With the techlash and an erosion of trust in technology as a positive force, it’s more important than ever that we make sure the AI community acts ethically.

Information related to Explainable AI (xAI)

Tech & Society

Google's AI Explains Itself: How Google's xAI tools help evaluate model performance

Google's AI platform offers a view into the mind of its machines. Explainable AI (xAI) tools show which features exerted the most influence on a model’s decision, so users can evaluate model performance and potentially mitigate biased results.

Tech & Society

Is AI Making Mastery Obsolete?: How human chess and go masters cope with being beaten by AI

Is there any reason to continue playing games that AI has mastered? Ask the former champions who have been toppled by machines.

Andrew Ng holding a sweatshirt that says "Trust the robot"

Letters

Building Trustworthy AI

Recently I wrote about major reasons why AI projects fail, such as small data, robustness, and change management. Given that some AI systems don't work, users and customers sometimes rightly wonder whether they should trust an AI system.

Tech & Society

Researchers Blocked at the Border: Some African AI researchers blocked from attending NeurIPS

Foreign researchers hoping to attend one of AI’s largest conferences were denied entry into Canada, where the event will be held. Most of those blocked were from developing nations.

Illustration of health related icons connected to a cloud

Tech & Society

When Private Data is Not Private: Google trained Project Nightingale on private patient data.

Google spent the past year training an AI-powered health care program using personal information from one of the largest hospital systems in the U.S. Patients had no idea — until last week.

Tech & Society

Blind Spot

In March 2018, one of Uber’s self-driving cars became the first autonomous vehicle reported to have killed a pedestrian. A new report by U.S. authorities suggests that the accident occurred because the car’s software was programmed to ignore jaywalkers.

Tech & Society

Survival of the Overfittest

Neuroevolution, which combines neural networks with ideas drawn from Darwin, is gaining momentum. Its advocates claim that they can achieve faster, better results by generating a succession of new models, each slightly different than its predecessors, rather than relying on a purpose-built model.