Earlier this month I was privileged to part of the inaugural conference of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI. The two day conference was held in Paris, on February 6th and 7th, and hosted by the OECD. The timing and location of the conference was arranged to directly precede the governmental AI summit on February 10th and 11th. I was one of around 650 invited representatives from academia, civil society, industry, media, and government. It was a remarkable meeting, with terrific keynote talks, including three from Nobel prize winners, Geoffrey Hinton, Maria Ressa and Joseph Stiglitz.
As someone who has been worrying about robot and AI ethics for longer than most who attended I was *very* pleased that there was a strong consensus around the need for regulation, supported by standards, alongside urgent concerns over the huge energy and water costs of AI that are completely at odds with sustainable development goals.
The conference concluded by publishing a Call to Action for lawmakers, academics, and the public ahead of the AI Summit, with ten critical action items. Overall, the action items are very good. I’m especially pleased to see ‘mandatory reporting of incidents’ in action 5. This is something I lobbied for. My one disappointment however is that the call for action statement has no explicit mention of the need to mitigate the energy costs of AI.
Here below are a few photos from the conference
A slide from Joseph Stiglitz’ wonderful keynote: AI and Economic Risk: Assessment and Mitigation.
No comments:
Post a Comment