AI is exciting – and an ethical minefield: 4 essential reads on the risks and concerns about this technology

tech.hindustantimes.com:

If you're like me, you've spent a lot of time over the past few months trying to figure out what this AI thing is all about.

Large-language models, generative AI, algorithmic bias – it's a lot for the less tech-savvy of us to sort out, trying to make sense of the myriad headlines about artificial intelligence swirling about.

But understanding how AI works is just part of the dilemma. As a society, we're also confronting concerns about its social, psychological and ethical effects.

Here we spotlight articles about the deeper questions the AI revolution raises about bias and inequality, the learning process, its impact on jobs, and even the artistic process.

Ethical debt

When a company rushes software to market, it often accrues “technical debt”: the cost of having to fix bugs after a program is released, instead of ironing them out beforehand.

There are examples of this in AI as companies race ahead to compete with each other.

More alarming, though, is “ethical debt,” when development teams haven't considered possible social or ethical harms – how AI could replace human jobs, for example, or when algorithms end up reinforcing biases.

Casey Fiesler, a technology ethics expert at the University of Colorado Boulder, wrote that she's “a technology optimist who thinks and prepares like a pessimist”: someone who puts in time speculating about what might go wrong.

That kind of speculation is an especially useful skill for technologists trying to envision consequences that might not impact them, Fiesler explained, but that could hurt “marginalised groups that are underrepresented” in tech fields.

When it comes to ethical debt, she noted, “the people who incur it are rarely the people who pay for it in the end.”

Is anybody there?

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