Blockchain May Play Crucial Role in Artificial Intelligence Development, Regulation Posted on : Oct 17 - 2017

The biggest threat for our future, according to Elon Musk, is the development of artificial intelligence (AI). 

As Musk recently pointed out:

“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful. I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish.”

Musk addresses a couple of key issues. The first is how we should take care when it comes to the implementation of AI. The second, and perhaps the most important challenge, is how can you regulate and oversee this technology? 

In today’s rush to adopt machine learning and AI techniques to gain a competitive advantage, there is a real danger that the technology will be deployed in an unsuitable field.  This ultimately results in bias and unfairness becoming encoded in our society. 

Cathy O’Neil in her book Weapons of Math Destruction lays out the dangers currently present when it comes to the rapid and unthinking adoption of machine learning and AI in a variety of different fields, including US prison sentencing and education. Her main thesis is that predictive models are never neutral but reflect the goals and ideologies of those who create them. They also tend to load the dice against poor people, reinforcing inequality in society.

From calculating university rankings or credit ratings and processing job applications, to deciding what advertising you see online or what stories appear in your Facebook news feed, algorithms play an increasingly important role in our lives.

This leads to the conclusion that when it comes to the design phase of machine learning, we must ensure that we have tested for and avoided obvious biases from the historic data and the data input itself.  View More