The White House wound up a nationwide series of workshops on artificial intelligence today on a cautionary note: Yes, AI promises to ease many of humanity’s ills, but humanity needs to make sure that flesh-and-blood policymakers are firmly in charge.
Latanya Sweeney, director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard’s Institute of Quantitative Social Science, said AI programs should be made to reflect the norms agreed upon by human society.
“I want the people we elect controlling those norms, not the technology itself. … The algorithms have to be able to be transparent, tested, and have some kind of warranty or be available for inspection,” she said during today’s public workshop, which was conducted at New York University.