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“You’re OK with doing business with evil people, right?” One of Australia’s leading venture capital advisers had asked me that question back when the first dotcom bubble was about to burst, in the year 2000 or 2001.
According to Beard, there has to be an ongoing discussion, including from people outside the organisation.
“As soon as you turn it into a box-ticking exercise it’s no longer ethics,” he said.
“Technology systems and processes will only reflect your good intentions, your desires, and your ethical disposition inasmuch as you put them in there explicitly. It’s not enough to have good intentions and then build a tool that doesn’t reflect those things.”
But back to the evil people…
Here in Australia, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has the potential to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic decision-making, but a number of public bodies are “becoming very timid” when it comes to technology, according to Julia Powles, Associate Professor of Technology Law and Policy at the University of Western Australia.
“This logic and fetishisation of innovation takes away from anything that would be about protecting individuals,” Powles told the conference.
“One of the reasons I get so infuriated about the conversation we have about AI is I think there’s never been a technology more realisable to the public interest,” she said.
To do AI, you need access to datasets, compute power, and smart people, and we have those things “in abundance”.
“To see the space and the development of technology so categorically deferred to a small number of private players is really quite tragic. The key piece of this is finance,” Powles said.
“At the moment, the only way to build scaleable tech systems is to have venture capital funding, which fundamentally compromises the sorts of systems you build.”
At the moment, then, it’s evil people all the way down.
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