The need for diverse development teams and truly representational data-sets to avoid biases being baked into AI algorithms is one of the core recommendations in a lengthy Lords committee report looking into the economic, ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence, and published today by the upper House of the UK parliament. “The main ways to address […] 
The need for diverse development teams and truly representational data-sets to avoid biases being baked into AI algorithms is one of the core recommendations in a lengthy Lords committee report looking into the economic, ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence, and published today by the upper House of the UK parliament.
“The main ways to address these kinds of biases are to ensure that developers are drawn from diverse gender, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, and are aware of, and adhere to, ethical codes of conduct,” the committee writes, chiming with plenty of extant commentary around algorithmic accountability.
“It is essential that ethics take centre stage in AI’s development and use,” adds committee chairman, Lord Clement-Jones, in a statement. “The UK has a unique opportunity to shape AI positively for the public’s benefit and to lead the international community in AI’s ethical development, rather than passively accept its consequences.”
The report also calls for the government to take urgent steps to help foster “the creation of authoritative tools and systems for auditing and testing training datasets to ensure they are representative of diverse populations, and to ensure that when used to train AI systems they are unlikely to lead to prejudicial decisions” — recommending a publicly funded challenge to incentivize the development of technologies that can audit and interrogate AIs.
“The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, in consultation with the Alan Turing Institute, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the British Standards Institute and other expert bodies, should produce guidance on the requirement for AI systems to be intelligible,” the committee adds. “The AI development sector should seek to adopt such guidance and to agree upon standards relevant to the sectors within which they work, under the auspices of the AI Council” — the latter being a proposed industry body it wants established to help ensure “transparency in AI”.
The committee is also recommending a cross-sector AI Code to try to steer developments in a positive, societally beneficial direction — though not for this to be codified in law (the suggestion is it could “provide the basis for statutory regulation, if and when this is determined to be necessary”).
Read the source article at TechCrunch.