We were very pleased to have Maurice Chiodo, a research mathematician at the University of Cambridge and principal investigator of the Cambridge University Ethics in Mathematics Project, join us for this ART-AI seminar, entitled ‘How do ethical issues arise in AI development?’ This seminar took place online on Zoom on Tuesday 14th March 2023, 12.15pm-1.15pm (GMT).
Many thanks to Maurice Chiodo for speaking and Scott Wellington for chairing.
The recording of this seminar is now available below along with an abstract and bio.
Abstract
By now most of us have heard of various instances where AI work has ignited public concern and outcry. These have occurred across many areas, including facial recognition, biased decision algorithms, deepfake media, etc. Most of the concerns raised in the public have been directed at the outcomes of such work, but not the processes involved in doing the technical development itself. However, these crucial ethical issues do not appear from nowhere; they often come from the way in which AI development is carried out.
In this talk I will discuss the various steps we take when we develop AI to assist in solving a tangible problem. Such work is never done in one day. Instead, it is carried out over time and broken up into stages. It is this process, from identifying the problem, to formulating how a solution might be implemented, to collecting the relevant data and running the appropriate computation, to deploying the output in a tangible world, and finally following up on that deployment, that can be scrutinised. By understanding the various shortcomings in such processes, we can begin to see where and how ethical issues are “injected” into our final products.
Bio
Maurice Chiodo is a research mathematician at the University of Cambridge, where he runs a seminar series on ethics in mathematics and is principal investigator of the Cambridge University Ethics in Mathematics Project. His work looks at ethical issues in all types of mathematical work, including AI, blockchain, finance, modelling, surveillance, and statistics. He sits on the ethics advisory group of Machine Intelligence Garage UK, and will soon be taking up a research role at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Maurice holds two PhDs in mathematics, from the University of Cambridge and the University of Melbourne.
