For enterprise leaders and their legal & compliance advisors Ethical Considerations for the Use of AI 1 Contents Exploring the ethical use of AI 3 The AI dilemma 3 Defining your ‘north star’ for AI 4 What is AI? 5 Defining AI 5 What makes AI possible? 6 Some examples of AI 6 Reaching human parity 7 The economic impact of AI 8 The promise of AI 9 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 18 AI skills are the key 18 Facial recognition technology: The need for public regulation and corporate responsibility 19 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 our AI systems are making the right choices and person and every organization on the planet to achieve decisions? How can we be sure the actions taken by more.” In the past, this mission has been tackled using an AI system are actions that are in our best interests? traditional computers, mobile devices, software, How can we be sure that an AI system doesn’t make connectivity and more recently with cloud computing. decisions or take actions that humans would consider But now, we are witnessing a technological revolution unfair or unethical? as platforms and machines become more intelligent than ever before, opening up new ways to empower humans and organizations. 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 In order to answer these questions and address these new smart technologies have been defined under the concerns, we need to remember that AI systems are term “artificial intelligence” or AI. ultimately built by humans. These systems work by using the data we provide and the algorithms we As with all great technology advances, artificial create that leverage the data to perform a desired intelligence will bring about vast changes some of function. It is up to us as designers, programmers, which are hard to imagine today. As we develop lawyers and managers to ensure the systems are computing systems to be increasingly intelligent we built to behave in way that is consistent with our own are all faced with a dilemma. We want these systems beliefs, laws and ethical standards. to be useful and truly intelligent yet how do we know 3 © 2018 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Defining your ‘north star’ for AI In 2016, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella published a transportation, agriculture and education while set of principles on the ethical use of AI. As Microsoft exploring some of the complex questions and broad continues to develop AI-based solutions, it remains societal concerns that these advances will bring about. focused on ensuring that its AI solutions and AI tools For an in-depth discussion of AI and the ethical are built on a foundation of these ethical principles. principles discussed in this paper as well as the impact In January 2018, Microsoft published the book of AI on our future, we encourage readers to read The The Future Computed which highlights the potential Future Computed. 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 decision- making 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 © 2018 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. What makes AI possible? The recent advances in AI to understand and respond AI development is at an inflection point, where the to the world are underpinned by two important vast amounts of available data, combined with Internet trends made possible by the development of cloud connectivity and affordable cloud computing power, computing—the ability to collect and store huge have facilitated substantial advances in innovative amounts of data and the ability to assign vast compute algorithms in the last 15 years. The promise of AI is power to analyze this data. 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 computers have also gained cognition or the ability to recognize faces, identify objects in images, transcribe learn and reason. speech, classify emotions, understand simple commands, or diagnose a disease. 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 Skype Translator allows students and teachers to increasingly able to identify what they are seeing connect over Skype and chat via a video call with live and hearing. Beyond identifying images and sounds, 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 © 2018 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. 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.