Title

The ethics of AI and the AI of ethics

Abstract

With the rapid growth of AI and its deployment with consequences to people, ethical concerns regarding AI have become extremely topical. In this talk I will present a view somewhat contrary relative to much of the current literature. After briefly summarizing some of the ethical concerns, I will argue that the ethical problems of AI can be well understood, and mitigations and progress can be made, by recognizing that AI, as a technology shares many features with other older technologies; that ethical decisions have always been made using technologies; that the careful formulation of the problems to be solved is more important than immediately attempting to come up with solutions; in so doing new and valuable research directions in AI are opened up; many of the problems ascribed to AI are more to do with the business models within which they are used; and while there are pressing problems that demand solving, there are also many promising prospects for making real ethical progress with AI technologies as tools - it all depends upon the choices that we make.

Bio

Robert C. Williamson received his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Queensland in 1990. Since then he has been at the Australian National University where he is currently a professor in the Research School of Computer Science. His research focusses upon theoretical aspects of machine learning.

He was instrumental in the creation of NICTA (2002-2015) a federally funded research centre in information and computing technology (approximately 700 people at its peak), serving variously as Canberra laboratory director, machine learning research group leader, scientific director, and interim CEO. He also served as chief scientist of DATA61 for 2 years (2015-2017).

He is the lead author of the report Technology and Australia’s Future (Australian Council of Learned Academies) 2015 which looked at the effects of new technology on Australia and made suggestions as to how they might be best understood and managed

He is currently a member of the Humanising Machine Intelligence grand challenge project at the ANU, a cross-campus collaboration involving computer science, philosophy, sociology, political science and economics.

He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science .