AI Public Policy and Social Impact - CXOTalk

What are the social, political, and government policy aspects of artificial intelligence? To learn more, we speak with Lord Tim Clement-Jones, Chairman of the House of Lords Select Committee on AI and advisor to the Council of Europe AI Committee.

In this conversation, we discuss:
-- What are the unique characteristics of artificial intelligence?
-- Algorithmic decision-making and risks
-- Trust and confidence in AI policy
-- Decision-making about AI policy and governance
-- How to balance competing interests in AI policy
-- Digital ethics: The House of Lords AI Report
-- Impact of AI on society and employment

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Read the full transcript and watch more videos: https://www.cxotalk.com/episode/house...

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From the conversation:

Michael Krigsman: How do you balance the interests of corporations against the public good, especially when it comes to AI? Maybe give us some specific examples.

Lord Tim Clement-Jones: For instance, we're seeing that in the online situation with social media. We've got this big debate happening, for instance, on whether or not it's legitimate for Twitter to delist somebody in terms of their account with them. No doubt, the same is true with Facebook and so on.
Now, maybe I shouldn't talk about it not being fair to a social media platform to have to make those decisions but—because of all the freedom of speech issues—I'd much prefer to see a reasonably clear set of principles and regulations that's about when social media platforms actually ought to delist somebody.
We're developing that in the UK in terms of Online Harms so that social media will have certain duties of care towards certain parts of the community, particularly young people and the vulnerable. They will have a duty to actually not delist or take off content or what has been called detoxing the algorithm. We're going to try and get a set of principles where people are protected and social media platforms have a duty, but it isn't a blanket and it doesn't mean that social media have to make freedom of speech decisions in quite the same way.
Inevitably, public policy is a balance and the big problem is ignorance. It's ignorance on the part of the social media platforms as to why we would want to regulate them and it's ignorance on the part of politicians who actually don't understand the niceties of all of this when they're trying to regulate.
As you know, some of us are quite dedicated to joining it all up so people really do understand why we're doing these things and getting the right solutions. Getting the right solution in this online area is really tricky.
Of course, at the middle of it, and this is why it's relevant to AI, is the algorithm, is the pushing of messages in particular directions which are autonomous. We're back to this autonomous issue, Michael.
Sometimes, you need to say, "I'm sorry." You need to be a lot more transparent about how this is working. It shouldn't be working in that way, and you're going to have to change it.
Now, I know that's a big, big change of culture in this area, but it's happening and I think that with the new administration, Congress, and so on, I think we'll all be on the same page very shortly.