This week, the White House published its report on the future of artificial intelligence (AI) — a product of four workshops held between May and July 2016 in Seattle, Pittsburgh, Washington DC and New York City (see go.nature.com/2dx8rv6).
During these events (which we helped to organize), many of the world’s leading thinkers from diverse fields discussed how AI will change the way we live. Dozens of presentations revealed the promise of using progress in machine learning and other AI techniques to perform a range of complex tasks in everyday life. These ranged from the identification of skin alterations that are indicative of early-stage cancer to the reduction of energy costs for data centres.
The workshops also highlighted a major blind spot in thinking about AI. Autonomous systems are already deployed in our most crucial social institutions, from hospitals to courtrooms. Yet there are no agreed methods to assess the sustained effects of such applications on human populations.
Recent years have brought extraordinary advances in the technical domains of AI. Alongside such efforts, designers and researchers from a range of disciplines need to conduct what we call social-systems analyses of AI. They need to assess the impact of technologies on their social, cultural and political settings.
A social-systems approach could investigate, for instance, how the app AiCure — which tracks patients’ adherence to taking prescribed medication and transmits records to physicians — is changing the doctor–patient relationship. Such an approach could also explore whether the use of historical data to predict where crimes will happen is driving overpolicing of marginalized communities. Or it could investigate why high-rolling investors are given the right to understand the financial decisions made on their behalf by humans and algorithms, whereas low-income loan seekers are often left to wonder why their requests have been rejected.
Read the full piece at Nature Magazine.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:10/13/2016