What do recent deployments of AI mean to the public or the average citizen? Will AI be a transparent technology, invisible at the public policy level? Is it too late to address the moral , ethical, and economic issues introduced by the commercialization of AI?
On September 14, 2017 the NEOACM (Northeast Ohio ACM) Professional chapter held the “We come in peace 2” AI panel hosted by the McDonough Museum of Fine Art in Youngstown Ohio. The members of the panel were: Doug McCollough: CIO of Dublin Ohio, Dr. Shiqi Zhang: AI and Robotics Reseacher at Cleveland State University, Andrew Konya: Co-founder & CEO of Remesh, a Cleveland-based AI company,Dr. Jay Ramanathan: Executive Director of Arthapedia.zone, Paul Carlson: Intelligent Community Strategist for Columbus Ohio and Dr. Mark Vopat: Professor of Political Philosophy, Applied Ethics at Youngstown State University. Our moderator was Nikola Danaylov, author of the best selling book “Conversations with Future: 21 Visions for the 21st century”.
The goal of the panel was to was discuss the latent consequences both positive and negative of recent AI based technologies that are being deployed and reach the general public. The scope of the goal ranged from the ethics and policy that must be considered as smart cities are brought on line to the impact of robotics and decision making technologies in law enforcement. The panel visited such diverse subject matter as Cognitive Computing to Agent Belief. While the focus originally started out on AI deployments in cities in the state of Ohio, it became clear that most of the issues where universal in nature. The panel started at 6:00 p.m. EDT and it was just getting warmed up when we had to bring it to a close at 8:00 p.m. EDT. There just wasn’t time to get to all of the questions, or to do justice to all of the issues and topics that were introduced during the panel. There was a burning desire to continue the conversation and debate. So after a discussion with some of our fellow ACM members at SIGAI and the AI panelists we’ve decided to carry over some of that discussion to an AI-Matters blog in hopes that we could engage the broader AI community as well as have a more flexible format that would give us ample time and space. Some of the highlights for the AI Panel can be found at:
2017 AI Panel “We come in peace”
The plan is to tackle some of the subject matter in this blog and to handle other aspects of the subject matter in webinar form. We hope that our fellow SIGAI members will feel free to contribute to this conversation as it develops providing questions, insights, suggestions, and direction. The moderator Nikola Danaylov and the panelists have all agreed to participate in this blog so if this blog goes anything like the panel discussion, “hold on to your seats”! We want to dive into the questions such as what does this recent incarnation of “Artificial Intelligence” mean to the public or for the average citizen? What impact will it have on infrastructure and the economy? From a commercialization perspective has “AI” been displaced by machine learning and data science? If AI and machine learning become transparent technologies will it be possible to regulate their impact on society? Is it already too late to stop any potential negative impact of AI based technologies? And I for one am looking forward to a continuation of the discussion of just what constitutes agent beliefs, where they come from, and how will agent belief systems be dealt with at the public policy or commercialization level. And then again perhaps even these are the wrong questions to be asking if our concern is the public good. We hope you join us as we attempt to deal with these questions and more.
Cheers
Cameron Hughes
Current Chair NEOACM Professional Chapter
SIGAI Member