Ethics in AI
This article from Quartz came into my phone's news feed this morning. AI conferences are beginning to think about ethics. Finally. Specifically, the premier machine learning conference NIPS requires a broader impact on society statement for presented research. One of the top natural language processing conferences, EMNLP, will now reject papers on ethical grounds. Whether these moves actually keep AI ethical or just push the dirty parts underground remains to be seen. But we all have a voice in keeping each other in check. When I was a PhD student, our advisor had us sit in on talks by prospective faculty and arranged for the prospect to meet with just the students. I remember one young man boasting of one NLP project after the other, each more horribly intrusive on innocent lives than the last. All of these done in internships with a major computer manufacturer. Finally, when we got to questions, I asked him, "Can you describe any project you have done which makes the world