Continuations

Google formed and then within a week dissolved an AI Ethics board, in the corporate equivalent of many celebrity weddings: ill conceived, but quickly ended. The calls for ethics in AI have been strong and understandable. AI is powerful technology that can and already has gone terribly wrong, as in the advertising and recommendation algorithms used by Facebook and Youtube. Now some of this stuff is obvious and there has been no lack of people pointing out the problems. If you train an algorith...

A quality that I find hugely important but increasingly rare in people is the willingness to admit mistakes. Growing up I wasn’t really part of a culture in which mistakes are openly discussed and used as an opportunity to learn. For a long time, my own approach was therefore one of just moving on or trying to fix things without admitting to any mistakes (often compounding the initial mistake in the process). But as I started to manage people I came to realize that if you want them to try thi...

Slightly belated we have another topic of the over at usv.com: The Ethics of Algorithms. I have written a bunch about this topic in the past, for instance when discussing the need for an opposing view reader or the danger of information cascades. Both the people working on algorithms, such as filtering a feed and making recommendations, and the endusers of these applications need to weigh in on the discussion. So head on over to usv.com and join in. PS If you don’t really know what an algorit...