For every exciting opportunity promised by artificial intelligence, there’s a potential downside that is its bleak mirror image. We hope that AI will allow us to make smarter decisions, but what if it ends up reinforcing the prejudices of society? We dream that technology might free us from work, but what if only the rich benefit, while the poor are dispossessed?
It’s issues like these that keep artificial intelligence researchers up at night, and they’re also the reason that Google is launching an AI initiative today to tackle some of these same problems. The new project is named PAIR (it stands for “People + AI Research”) and its aim is to “study and redesign the ways people interact with AI systems” and try to ensure that the technology “benefits and empowers everyone.”
Google wants to help everyone from coders to users
It’s a broad remit, and an ambitious one. Google says PAIR will look at a number of different issues affecting everyone in the AI supply chain — from the researchers who code algorithms, to the professionals like doctors and farmers who are (or soon will be) using specialized AI tools. The tech giant says it wants to make AI user-friendly, and that means not only making the technology easy to understand (getting AI to explain itself is a known and challenging problem) but also ensuring that it treats its users equally.
It’s been noted time and time again that the prejudices and inequalities of society often become hard-coded in AI. This might mean facial recognition software that doesn’t recognize light-skinned users, or a language processing program which assume that doctors are always male and nurses are always female.