I spoke with Klint Finley over at WIRED about Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft’s new joint ethics and oversight venture, which they’ve dubbed the “Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society.” They held a joint press briefing, today, in which Yann LeCun, Facebook’s director of AI, and Mustafa Suleyman, the head of applied AI at DeepMind discussed what it was that this new group would be doing out in the world. From the Article:

Creating a dialogue beyond the rather small world of AI researchers, LeCun says, will be crucial. We’ve already seen a chat bot spout racist phrases it learned on Twitter, an AI beauty contest decide that black people are less attractive than white people and a system that rates the risk of someone committing a crime that appears to be biased against black people. If a more diverse set of eyes are looking at AI before it reaches the public, the thinking goes, these kinds of thing can be avoided.

The rub is that, even if this group can agree on a set of ethical principles–something that will be hard to do in a large group with many stakeholders—it won’t really have a way to ensure those ideals are put into practice. Although one of the organization’s tenets is “Opposing development and use of AI technologies that would violate international conventions or human rights,” Mustafa Suleyman, the head of applied AI at DeepMind, says that enforcement is not the objective of the organization.

This isn’t the first time I’ve talked to Klint about the intricate interplay of machine intelligence, ethics, and algorithmic bias; we discussed it earlier just this year, for WIRED’s AI Issue. It’s interesting to see the amount of attention this topic’s drawn in just a few short months, and while I’m trepidatious about the potential implementations, as I note in the piece, I’m really fairly glad that more people are more and more willing to have this discussion, at all.

To see my comments and read the rest of the article, click through, here: “Tech Giants Team Up to Keep AI From Getting Out of Hand”