Abhishek vs Terminator

There’s these metaphors that sum up a lot of what we’re trying to do here, what needs to be done on planet Earth, from climate change to COVID to AI ethics, which is something you definitely need to know and care about before it's too late, there are like 7 Terminator movies and only 1/3 of them are any good.

Anyways!

Re: today’s conversation, we need to design and implement standardized AI ethics regulations across everything AI touches, so, everything, while also asking questions like: what is “ethical”?

And who gets to decide?

And why do they get to decide?

And how are they incentivized to decide, in today’s society?

And who provides those incentives?

Who gets to regulate all of this?

Who elects the regulators?

And how do we make sure companies actually implement all of this?

These are among the most important questions of our time, because AI touches everything you do.

The phone in your hand, your insurance, your mortgage, your flood risk, your wildfire risk, your electronic health record, your face, your taxes, your police record, those Instagram ads for the concerningly comfortable sweatpants, your 401k –

– some version of AI, whether it’s the AI we always thought was coming or not – is integrated into every part of your life.

My guest in Episode #132 is Abhishek Gupta.

Abhiskek is the founder and principal researcher at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, an international non-profit research institute, with a mission to democratize AI ethics literacy.

He works in machine learning and serves on the CSE Responsible AI Board at Microsoft, he works as the Chair of the Standards Working Group at the Green Software Foundation, and is the author of the widely read AI Ethics Brief, and the State of the AI Ethics Reports, the most recent of which just dropped.

Abhishek helps me ask better questions every single week and his work is instrumental to helping society build not only more powerful and equitable AI, but one that somehow improves on the most important element of all: us.

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INI Book Club:

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Links:

• Montreal AI Ethics Institute
• Follow Abhishek on Twitter
• Get Volume 6 of the State of AI Ethics Report (PDF)
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• Edited by Anthony Luciani
• Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com
• Artwork by Amrit Pal