Trustworthy and Ethical AI Systems — needed!!

Far from the stuff of science fiction, AI has moved from the exclusive regimes of theoretical mathematics and advanced hardware to an everyday aspect of life.

- Henry J. Schumacher [e-mail]

Over the last several years of exponentially accelerating development and proliferation, our needs and requirements for mature AI systems have begun to crystallize.

Trust is not an internal quality of an AI system like accuracy, or even fairness. Instead, it’s a characteristic of the human-machine relationship formed with an AI system. No AI system can come off the shelf with trust baked in. Instead, trust needs to be established between an AI user and the system, which must be dominated by humans!!!

The highest bar for AI trust can be summed up in the following question: What would it take for you to trust an AI system with your life?

Fostering trust in AI systems is the great obstacle to bringing into reality transformative AI technologies like autonomous vehicles or the large-scale integration of machine intelligence into medicine. To neglect the need for AI trust is also to downplay the influence of the AI systems already embedded in our everyday financial and industrial processes, along with the increasing interweaving of our socioeconomic health and algorithmic decision-making.