Ethical Considerations for the Use of AI

For enterprise leaders and their legal & compliance advisors

1

Contents

Exploring the ethical use of AI

The AI dilemma
33

4

Deﬁning your ‘north star’ for AI

What is AI?

5

566789
Deﬁning AI What makes AI possible? Some examples of AI Reaching human parity The economic impact of AI The promise of AI

Microsoft’s approach to AI

10

An overview of Microsoft’s AI solutions

10

But what about AI ethics?

11

AI must be built on an ethical foundation

11

Microsoft’s framework for ethical AI

12

Microsoft’s six AI principles

12

Recommendations for how to approach AI Ethics in your organization

AI skills are the key
18 18

19

Facial recognition technology: The need for public regulation and corporate responsibility

Ensuring AI empowers us all

20

Using AI to build a better world

20

For more information about AI and GDPR

21

Ethical Considerations for the Use of AI

Exploring the ethical use of AI

As with all great technology advances, artiﬁcial intelligence will bring about vast changes some of which are hard to imagine today. How can we be sure the actions taken by an Artiﬁcial Intelligence or
AI system are actions that are in our best interests?

The AI dilemma

Microsoft’s corporate mission is “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” In the past, this mission has been tackled using traditional computers, mobile devices, software, connectivity and more recently with cloud computing. But now, we are witnessing a technological revolution as platforms and machines become more intelligent than ever before, opening up new ways to empower humans and organizations. our AI systems are making the right choices and decisions? How can we be sure the actions taken by an AI system are actions that are in our best interests? How can we be sure that an AI system doesn’t make decisions or take actions that humans would consider unfair or unethical?

These advances will make systems easier to use, bring

more data to our ﬁngertips and create new ways to

address every day needs. New intelligent systems— working with humans—have the potential to also solve some of society’s greatest challenges such as poverty, disease and lack of education. Together, these types of

new smart technologies have been deﬁned under the term “artiﬁcial intelligence” or AI.

In order to answer these questions and address these concerns, we need to remember that AI systems are ultimately built by humans. These systems work by using the data we provide and the algorithms we create that leverage the data to perform a desired function. It is up to us as designers, programmers, lawyers and managers to ensure the systems are built to behave in way that is consistent with our own beliefs, laws and ethical standards.

As with all great technology advances, artiﬁcial

intelligence will bring about vast changes some of which are hard to imagine today. As we develop computing systems to be increasingly intelligent we are all faced with a dilemma. We want these systems to be useful and truly intelligent yet how do we know

3

Deﬁning your ‘north star’ for AI

In 2016, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella published a set of principles on the ethical use of AI. As Microsoft continues to develop AI-based solutions, it remains focused on ensuring that its AI solutions and AI tools are built on a foundation of these ethical principles. transportation, agriculture and education while exploring some of the complex questions and broad societal concerns that these advances will bring about.

For an in-depth discussion of AI and the ethical principles discussed in this paper as well as the impact of AI on our future, we encourage readers to read The

Future Computed.

In January 2018, Microsoft published the book The Future Computed which highlights the potential for AI to augment the abilities of humans to create breakthrough advances in areas such as healthcare,

This paper presents some of Microsoft’s ideas on how organizations can understand both the

beneﬁts and the impacts of AI and provides some recommendations for how to ethically deploy AI

solutions in a fair and transparent way.

4

What is AI?

Artificial Intelligence or AI has become a widely used, catch-all phrase that pops up in technical discussions, science fiction, analyst reports, news and beyond. It seems to get applied to almost any technology that is ground breaking or futuristic. But most experts agree that AI can be precisely defined in terms that even non- technologists can understand.

Deﬁning AI

Perception, learning, reasoning and decisionmaking are key features of human intelligence. When computers perform these operations, they

are said to be performing Artiﬁcial Intelligence (AI)

routines. Recent advances in AI have been fueled by improvements in machine learning techniques that can identify patterns in large data sets and use these patterns to make predictions or recommendations. The systems learn from a part of the data, their predictions are then tested against the remainder of
For more information on AI, be sure to read our AI

the data. They are further reﬁned to be increasingly

Insights feature: A Short Introduction to Artiﬁcial

more accurate. It is the learning component that

Intelligence.

makes AI different from historical approaches to building machines or programming software. AI is not explicitly programmed to respond a certain way, it learns to respond that way.

5

What makes AI possible?

The recent advances in AI to understand and respond to the world are underpinned by two important trends made possible by the development of cloud computing—the ability to collect and store huge amounts of data and the ability to assign vast compute power to analyze this data.

AI development is at an inﬂection point, where the

vast amounts of available data, combined with Internet connectivity and affordable cloud computing power, have facilitated substantial advances in innovative algorithms in the last 15 years. The promise of AI is that the knowledge gained from applying analytics and machine learning to the available data will enhance any decision-making process with additional insights and intelligence, leading to better outcomes and improvements in every aspect of people’s lives and the world around us. A better term for AI is “computational intelligence” where the advantages of computer processes are harnessed to help people make better decisions.

Some examples of AI

AI solutions are also pushing the boundaries of enabling people to interact with systems more naturally. For example:

•••

Vision: the ability to recognize a picture or a video. Speech: the ability to listen and transcribe words in a text. Language: the ability to comprehend a variety of languages, evaluate sentiment and learn how to recognize what users want.

•

Knowledge: the ability to detect and draw inferences on how disparate pieces of information are related to

each other. For example, AI systems can predict how bad traffic will be, based on historical traffic flows for the

time of day and season, while also looking at real-time data from weather conditions, incidents and events in the area.

Computers are learning the way people do, through experience, and for computers, experience is captured in the form of data. Fundamentally, AI is about computers understanding and responding to events in the world. There are two pieces to this—perception and cognition.

6

For example, “perception” means the system can recognize faces, identify objects in images, transcribe speech, classify emotions, understand simple commands, or diagnose a disease. computers have also gained cognition or the ability to learn and reason.

Computers are now able to comprehend and translate languages and to study patterns and make predictions.
“Cognition” goes further by analyzing data to translate sentences, answer questions, drive cars, play chess, determine when a part needs repair or recommend a medical treatment.

Humans can perceive and understand, and now computers are increasingly able to replicate these abilities in many areas. Machines have been able to see and hear for a long time. Cameras have been capturing images since 1839 and sound recordings have been possible since 1877. Modern computational machines not only capture images and sounds. They are now increasingly able to identify what they are seeing and hearing. Beyond identifying images and sounds,
Skype Translator allows students and teachers to connect over Skype and chat via a video call with live translation.

Reaching human parity

In many ways, modern AI systems have already come close to meeting human capabilities in several key areas. For example, Microsoft Research has developed AI technology that has achieved some remarkable milestones:

••••
96% of image recognition parity with humans—as good as a college graduate. 95% of speech recognition parity with humans—the standard of professionaltranscriptionists Strong progress in translation—Microsoft Translator can translate 62 languages Almost 90% reading parity with humans

7

Computers are learning the way people do, through experience, and for computers, experience is captured in the form of data. Fundamentally, AI is about computers understanding and responding to events in the world. There are two pieces to this— perception and cognition.

And yet, while AI systems are reaching parity in these discrete tasks, these systems will be challenged to deal with unique human concepts such as empathy and emotion.It is also worth noting that none of these areas have reached 100% parity. But humans don’t operate at 100% either and make errors all the time. AI doesn’t need to be 100% accurate to be valuable.

The economic impact of AI

Industry analysts, governments, and Microsoft believe that AI can positively transform both developed and developing economies. production that “promises to transform the basis of economic growth for countries across the world.”

This chart shows Accenture’s estimate of the positive growth-accelerating effect AI is likely to have on some of the world’s most advanced economies. The light blue bars indicate Accenture’s assessment of each economy’s baseline growth potential, while the dark blue bars show its forecast for these economies boosted by AI.
A recent study by Accenture argues very persuasively

that “artiﬁcial intelligence is the future of growth.”

According to this study, increases in capital and labor are no longer driving the kind of sustained and truly global economic growth we’ve seen in the past. But Accenture’s study of AI’s potential has led it to conclude that AI is becoming a new factor of

8

The promise of AI

Microsoft, in line with its corporate mission “to

empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” ﬁrmly believes in using

AI to achieve these goals, leading to advances in

nearly every ﬁeld of human endeavor. When made

accessible to everyone, AI will transform industries, make us more productive, help solve the world’s biggest challenges, and lead to important advances in education, healthcare, transportation, agriculture and many other areas. capabilities, including speech and image recognition to help the visually impaired to “see” the world around them.

Environmental sustainability

AI can also enable us to better address environmental concerns. Microsoft launched AI for Earth in London in June 2017—a new initiative dedicated to the sustainability challenges of agriculture, water management and distribution, biodiversity, and climate change.

Healthcare

With the world’s population expected to grow by nearly 2.5 billion people over the next quarter

century, AI offers signiﬁcant opportunities to

increase food production by improving agricultural yield and reducing waste. For example, in precision farming, sensors are used to provide real time measurements such as moisture and soil conditions, which are then analyzed to help provide farmers with recommendations on how to maximize their yields.
For example, in healthcare, AI systems are already helping people tackle complex problems. A good example is Project InnerEye, a project in which U.K.- based researchers at Microsoft have teamed up with oncologists to develop an AI system to help treat cancer more effectively.

As another example, AI can reduce hospital readmission, enhance the quality of care for managing chronic disorders, and keep hospitals safe and

efﬁcient.

An Institute of Medicine study released in May 2016 estimated that preventable errors in hospitals are the third leading cause of death in the US, trailing only heart disease and cancer. The number of deaths is estimated to exceed 250,000 patients per year. AI systems can be developed to catch errors by recognizing anomalies in best clinical practices, saving thousands of patients per year.

Overcoming disabilities

AI for Earth puts Microsoft cloud and AI tools in the hands of those working to solve global environmental challenges. Through grants that provide access to cloud and AI tools, opportunities for education and training on AI, and investments in innovative, scalable solutions, AI for Earth works to advance sustainability across the globe.

Another area where AI has the potential to have a

signiﬁcant positive impact is in serving the more than

one billion people in the world with disabilities. One example of this is Microsoft’s “Seeing AI” application. Saqib Shaikh, a Microsoft senior software engineer in the UK, lost his sight when he wasseven years old. He was inspired to develop an application that uses AI

9

Microsoft’s approach to AI

Microsoft is both a supplier of AI technology and company that increasingly uses AI to run its business. In both cases, Microsoft believes that AI must be used to beneﬁt employees, partners, customers and society as a whole.

An overview of Microsoft’s AI solutions

AI offers incredible opportunities to drive widespread economic and societal progress and Microsoft’s mission is simply to make the computational
Microsoft is also infusing AI into its end-user products. For example, Windows is more secure thanks to AI systems that detect malware and automatically protect computers against it. PowerPoint Presentation Translator enables auto-captioning and translation into over 60 languages. The auto-captioning feature can also help people with hearing loss to engage more productively at work. intelligence of AI available to everyone. Microsoft is using AI capabilities to develop and enhance its

products and services (such as Windows and Ofﬁce),

as well as making AI tools available to developers and organizations to build their own AI-powered products.

The Microsoft AI platform offers services, tools, and infrastructure to make AI development easier for developers and organizations of all sizes. Microsoft’s service offerings include Microsoft Cognitive Services—a set of pre-built AI capabilities, including vision, speech, language, search, and knowledge capabilities, that are run in the cloud and can be easily integrated into applications with just a few lines of code. Other technologies help simplify the creation and integration of “bots” that can improve the customer service experience. A set of infrastructure offerings include tools that make the AI development process easier.
And Microsoft’s AI business solutions include intelligence systems to improve an organization’s ability to gain insights and formulate better courses of action using the information that they have gathered.

Microsoft also Open Sourced the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, a set of capabilities used by Microsoft engineers to achieve breakthroughs in AI and is contributing data sets to advance development of machine comprehension of text.

10

But what about AI ethics?

The introduction of every new technology throughout history has brought about both positive and negative changes with regard to humans and the work they do. With AI systems becoming capable of cognitive tasks once only thought possible by humans, how do we ensure that AI only helps humans and never harms us? As computers are able to interact with the world in the same way that humans do, how will those interactions impact real people?

AI must be built on an ethical foundation

We are now empowering computers to use AI tomake decisions without human input that werepreviously made by humans, or at least guided by human decisions. If we allow computers to perceive, learn, reason and make decisionswithout human oversight, it is important to think about the impact AI will have on people and the ethics that should underpin AI.

Making the technologies available alone is not sufﬁcient.

For AI to be adopted and deployed on a global scale, we need to develop AI in a way that people believe to be trustworthy.

There is broad consensus about what kinds of behavior are considered responsible and acceptable for human behavior. In general, this consensus grows out of norms that are implicitly understood, consistently applied in everyday social interactions, and reinforced in laws. The same standards should apply to non-human, AI behavior. Making AI trustworthy can be realized only if relevant stakeholders from business, government, civil society, and the research community collaborate on shared

For AI to be adopted and deployed on a global scale, we need to develop AI in a way that people believe to be trustworthy.

principles and ethical frameworks.

Making AI trustworthy can be realized only if relevant stakeholders from business, government, civil society, and the research community collaborate on shared principles and ethical frameworks.

11

Microsoft’s framework for

ethical AI

At Microsoft, over the last couple of years there have been discussions at every level within the company and from every discipline about how to build ethical AI solutions. These discussions have led Microsoft to believe that the development and deployment of AI must be guided by an ethical framework.

Microsoft’s six AI principles

As laid out in The Future Computed, Microsoft has established six core principles that we believe guide development of AI products and solutions. These consist of four core principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, and inclusiveness—which are built on two foundational principles: transparency and accountability. We encourage others to consider how to apply these principles to their organizations, and how their own values may lead to development of additional principles.

12

Fairness

At the most fundamental level, AI systems should treat everyone fairly and impartially and not affect similarly situated groups of people in different ways.We all need to ensure that AI is not programmed to make biased or discriminatory decisions. identify different perspectives that need to be considered during the development process.

When AI-based recommendations are applied, a full understanding of the limitations of the system is essential to ensure that the outcome does not lead to

unequal impacts.

The design of any AI system starts with the choice of

training data—which is also the ﬁrst place where bias can enter the system. Training data should sufﬁciently

represent the world in which we live. AI researchers have discovered, to their chagrin, that when they are not careful in training AI algorithms in scenarios like face recognition, these algorithms can perform poorly on groups that have only a small representation in the training data.
For example, a credit rating algorithm that suggests a person has an 80% probability of being a credit risk is also suggesting that, in 20% of the cases, someone with similar characteristics is not a risk. This insight needs to be taken into consideration by people who are using the algorithm to make decisions that impacts people. These types of systems should be used inform people