Good AI Governance is NOT the Real Objective
Happy New Year Everyone! :)
I hope all my subscribers have a great and restful year-end holiday and is ready to make 2024 another productive year. I will like to wish you all the best in 2024 and share with me any achievement made along the year by PM me on LinkedIn. :)
I will like to take this opportunity to share something I was thinking of the past weeks and will like to work on in the coming years. The thought of working on it actually excites me a lot. Here goes. :)
2023 was the year of Generative AI. We saw many possibilities and also potential abuse and ‘danger’ in using these Generative AI models. It is the first time “hallucination” was brought into the public mindshare after a longest while and it’s not because of any famous magician. There were many issues such as copyrights violation, wrong references provided, data security, hyper-realistic images that even computer cannot differentiate etc. This create a sense of uncertainty and fear to a certain extent that accompanies after the excitement brought about by Generative AI. Not forgetting towards the end of last year, prominent AI researchers were split into two camps, “Existential Risk” and “No Existential Risk”. This further added uncertainty and fear into Artificial Intelligence and its future.
My opinion is AI will be here to stay regardless because capitalism has “tasted blood”. More money will be put into developing “profit-generating” AI. Many professionals, researchers and politicians thought so too and “AI Ethics & Governance Committees” sprung up all over the world, so as to “manage” the downside of AI, or at least that is what all these committees are believed to be doing.
Without going into lengthy debates on who sit in these committees and whether they have relevant backgrounds, there was something else that was gnawing me through this period when “AI Governance & Ethics” speaks in loud and large volume. My intuition was telling me we are still not working and solving the root cause of the challenge.
After a few long walks and books, I got an epiphany. We should not be building “Ethical AI” (whatever it means) per some LinkedIn “experts” are “advocating”, but rather we should be building AI that people can trust or should I say “Trustworthy AI”. As practitioners, we should be looking at the whole AI value chain, structure it in a way that will lead to relevant stakeholders trusting AI will be making the best decision for all the relevant stakeholders possible. Once the general public knows they can trust AI, the fear and uncertainty will reduce, resulting in a wider adoption and development of AI. At least that is the vision I hope for. :)
You will see that “Ethical AI”, “Responsible AI” and even AI Governance at the end of the day is really about building AI that can be trusted. The need to build Trustworthy AI should be the approach practitioners and researchers adopt to ensure a healthy proliferation of AI as a tool to support the growth of humanity.
Some of my subscribers might have heard about a similarly titled book written by Beena Ammarath. In her book, she stated the values that AI mature companies should keep in mind when using AI. IMO, this is only just a tip of the iceberg in building Trustworthy AI because there are other stakeholders involved as well like business, employees, government & regulators etc.
People who are familiar with my work will know I am not a big fan of the term “AI Ethics” but rather “AI Professional Ethics”. (See below for my blog post on this.). I also have some discomfort with the term “AI Governance” as well although only in recent days then I was able to point this out. To me the term “governance”, consist of a certain level of lack of trust, or adversarial relationship between the “governing” and “governed”. In that case, its a matter of which side has the most resources and can attract the necessary talent, and unfortunately, it turns into a “police and thief game” rather. However, I am not disputing the need for “AI Governance”, just more of that is not something I want to start with and thus moving to “Building Trustworthy AI”.
To conclude here, “Building Trustworthy AI” will be one of the major topics I will be working on in 2024 and beyond. To sum up, below will be the topics I will be working on:
Building Trustworthy AI - Constituting AI Governance, Laws, Regulations & Compliance.
Human + Machine Intelligence - Similarities & Differences and how can they complement each other to solve more problems.
What the Future with AI going to be and how can we prepared, as individuals, businesses and as a population in a country.
If these topics interest you, stay tuned for my content and if you know anyone who might be interested as well, please get them to subscribe to my newsletter at least. My end-2024 target is to get at least 1,700 subscribers so any assistance is appreciated! :)
Thank you and I wish everyone reading this a very productive and happy 2024! :)
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My post on why I do not believe in “AI Ethics”. (Blog)
You raise several good points for discussion, Koo. Ethics vs Governance vs Trust.
1. The term 'Ethical AI' has no meaning – it's a machine, it has no ethics. Ethics belong to the realm of human activities. Unless there is evidence that AI is sentient, we should never be using that term as it obfuscate the issues.
2. Governance is always about good practices and the prevention of abuse. Unless there is real evidence that AI poses an existential threat (empty hollow words at this point by naive government officials looking to virtue signal), governing a technology makes no sense. Nobody governs automation processes. Nobody governs the steam engine. There is governance, or rather, safeguards for nuclear.
3. Widespread adoption of the technology is its own form of 'governance' as counter-opposing forces, driven by capitalistic ideals (i.e. making money rather than cutting the hand that feeds it), will ensure that no single group dominates. This, in turn, reduces asymmetric risks and potential abuse. And this should be at the heart of why TRUST becomes important – to drive widespread usage and adoption.
History has shown us time and again that the people harping on about "ethics" are usually the people who lack them the most.