Should there be a self-regulation of the industries themselves?
Should there be a self-regulation of the industries
themselves?
Self-regulation is an alternative method of governing artificial intelligence
on industries and other identities. It’s another form of regulation so each company
has the opportunity of creating new rules and standards for themselves, many
times in areas where the laws of the government are lacking. I find this regulation
as being a good complement technique when associated with the public one to
solve some exclusive and unique challenges that artificial intelligence can come
to develop on each industry, and it may overcome the competitive problem that stimulates
the development of artificial intelligences to be faster rather than safer.
The biggest technologies’ companies created the currently existing Partnership
of Artificial Intelligence - such companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, DeepMind, Microsoft, and IBM (International Business Machines Corporation).
This Partnership is the most well-known representative body that works to cooperate
on AI safety and its mission is to study and create the best methods on
technologies of AI. There is a fragment of the partnership: The Advanced Technology
External Advisory Council, or ATEAC, a committee created to give guidance to
Google on how to ethically develop new technologies. This committee got accused
by a group of employees of the multinational Mountain View, known as “Googlers Against
Transphobia and Hateful” of including the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kay
Coles James, on the council causing an outrage over her conservative ideals, against
the whole cause for helping the environment, against LGBTQ people and for her
anti-immigrant perspective, because of her hateful declarations it caused many people
to doubt the impartiality that she could have and the influence of this in the development
of the future of artificial intelligence on part of the industry.
She once said, against the Equality
Law in the United States: “If they can change the definition of women to
include men, they can erase efforts to empower women economically, socially,
and politically,” (…) “The equality act is
anything but equality. This bill would shut down businesses and charities,
politicize medicine, endanger parental rights, and open every female bathroom
and sports team to biological males.”.
The inclusion of the Heritage Foundation’s president led almost 2500
Google employees to create and sign a petition so she would be removed from the
committee. Unfortunately, what happened was that Google completely deleted any
sign of the petition and it didn’t go through with the desires of the employees.
There was such a big controversial about the inclusion of Kay Coles James because
supposedly they created a board that would induce and guide the company so it
would have more ethical values and Kay Coles James was completely the opposite of
that concept.
The people that are chosen to be on a so important board shouldn’t be
based on how recognized or famous they are seen from the outside but instead
they should have open-minded, impartial ideas.
Then, for ethic boards to have a meaningful impact, they must share the
criteria they use to select their members, each role and responsibility so everyone
has the opportunity to know how they produce effectiveness and to be able to determine
if it’s a valuable ethical compass and not just a shallow way to say they have morals.
If AI ethics isn’t about preventing public risks, then it’s hard to know what technology companies think it is, other than
empty words.
So, this is one of
the examples on how self-regulation would be a valuable way for AI industries
to progress. More than ever, because of the media, technology companies need to
be extra careful with what message they are passing and need to regulate what
goes through and how people view and interpret them.
"Be transparent and specific about the roles and responsibilities
ethics boards have" Rashida Richardson, director of policy research at the
AI Now Institute
In this same line of
thoughts, in the past it happened a viral scandal around one of the biggest
companies of them all. In 2016 Facebook was accused of storing data about its
users and selling it to other companies, one of them being called Cambridge Analytica.
Cambridge Analytica was
a private business that analyzed data and used strategic marketing. But what this
industry really did was using Facebook given data (and not only) to mainly manipulate
presidential elections on lot of different countries. Their strategy was literally
selecting the data with its own created criteria and algorithm and it would find
the people that they thought would be the easiest to distort, so the easiest
minds to put their influence on. They were payed directly by candidates to presidency
to corrupt the votes just by changing people’s minds. Taking their data and
understanding what their ideas were and what they wanted to attend to. A normal
thing such as scenario of a country where there are more young people involved
in the politics would make the company focus on that age range and if they
would check a bigger pattern of open-minded people than people with
conservative ideas, for example, they would create an whole campaign for the client
- which would be a candidate for presidency - in a way that all that group of
people would think their ideas are being listened to and easily changing their votes.
They got to implement short advertments on people’s everyday technologies and implemented
an idea on their heads to their favor.
This company was a big deal
on United States of America when it helped Donald Trump’s elections. It used
the same method and it was well payed to advertise the most it could against
the campaign of its opponents. They voluntarily advertised more and more random
videos related to crimes done by foreigners so when people saw Donald Trump’s campaign,
(normally) excluding non-north American people from their country, they were influenced
to think that same way, as it would be a good plan to exclude immigrants.
The company went all
over the world, working side to side with candidates even on third-world countries.
They worked for Brexit or the Leave.EU campaign to help the United Kingdom exiting
the European Union. Using the same methodology; targeting U.K. voters on social
media so that, once more, they were supporting themselves and their own interests
with more subtle messages and pushing their ideas to outside of the European
Union.
There is coming to a point
where it should be concerning the lack of control of how these digital campaigns
are getting because people aren’t being allowed to have an opinion by
themselves, they are constantly being bombed with some company idea and advertise
and this is happening even with common products created by what we think are
normal industries and for them we are being sold to. Our data is all over the
place. A simple thing as liking a post about a workout will get us to infinite advertisements
about the best fitness centers we have around and their prices. They are selling
our private ideas and preferences.
"Data profiling of voters was done at a more
sophisticated level in the referendum than ever before," Collins, the
British politician, told POLITICO. "It's a big concern, we should pass
emergency legislation to mandate transparency in political campaigns."
In my opinion, there’s a
giant lack of control on how artificial intelligences are being regulated. Not
only by the public side but each company should have its own hands to measure
and their own critical and ethical values carefully selected to guarantee the
safety of the future of artificial intelligence and for this, both self and public
regulation must go hand-in-hand.
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