I find articles and conversations around ethical usage of machine learning and artificial intelligence fascinating. Here’s another one by Benedict Evans. Here are his outline bullets — the whole article is well worth the read.
- We worry about face recognition just as we worried about databases - we worry what happens if they contain bad data and we worry what bad people might do with them
- It’s easy to point at China, but there are large grey areas where we don’t yet have a clear consensus of what ‘bad’ would actually mean, and how far we worry because this is different rather than just because it’s just new and unfamiliar
- Like much of machine learning, face recognition is quickly becoming a commodity tech that many people can and will use to build all sorts of things. ‘AI Ethics’ boards can go a certain way but can’t be a complete solution, and regulation (which will take many forms) will go further. But Chinese companies have their own ethics boards and are already exporting their products.