Outfitting Self-Driving Cars With AI Ethics Tuning Knobs

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

[Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/]

Increasingly, AI developers are being asked to carefully design and build their AI mechanizations by ensuring that ethical considerations are at the forefront of the AI systems development process.

When fielding AI, those responsible for the operational use of the AI also need to be considering crucial ethical facets of the in-production AI systems. Meanwhile, the public and those using or reliant upon AI systems are starting to clamor for heightened attention to the ethical and unethical practices and capacities of AI.

Consider a simple example. Suppose an AI application is developed to assess car loan applicants. Using Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), the AI system is trained on a trove of data and arrives at some means of choosing among those that it deems are loan worthy and those that are not.

The underlying Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is so computationally complex that there are no apparent means to interpret how it arrives at the decisions being rendered. Also, there is no built-in explainability capability and thus…