72. Margot Gerritsen - Does AI have to be understandable to be ethical?

As AI systems have become more ubiquitous, people have begun to pay more attention to their ethical implications. Those implications are potentially enormous: Google’s search algorithm and Twitter’s recommendation system each have the ability to meaningfully sway public opinion on just about any issue. As a result, Google and Twitter’s choices have an outsized impact — not only on their immediate user base, but on society in general.

That kind of power comes with risk of intentional misuse (for example, Twitter might choose to boost tweets that express views aligned with their preferred policies). But while intentional misuse is an important issue, equally challenging is the problem of avoiding unintentionally bad outputs from AI systems.

Unintentionally bad AIs can lead to various biases that make algorithms perform better for some people than for others, or more generally to systems that are optimizing for things we actually don’t want in the long run. For example, platforms like Twitter and YouTube have played an important role in the increasing polarization of their US (and worldwide) user bases. They never intended to do this, of course, but their effect on social cohesion is arguably the result of internal cultures based on narrow metric optimization: when you optimize for short-term engagement, you often sacrifice long-term user well-being.

The unintended consequences of AI systems are hard to predict, almost by definition. But their potential impact makes them very much worth thinking and talking about — which is why I sat down with Stanford professor, co-director of the Women in Data Science (WiDS) initiative, and host of the WiDS podcast Margot Gerritsen for this episode of the podcast.