An Ethics Ecosystem for AI and Big Data: Why? What? How?

Abstract: This talk motivates the need for an ethics ecosystem (or collection of ethics ecosystems) to govern the research, design, development, and deployment of technologies powered by modern AI and big data analytics. Despite the genuine desire of many key stakeholders to do the right thing, we keep failing to mitigate against the ethical costs associated with these technologies and often fall into the same ethical traps. This talk articulates some of these ethical traps, articulates the components of an ethics ecosystem that are essential to avoiding them, and explains some efforts to try to develop such an ecosystem.

Bio: John Basl is an associate professor of philosophy and AI and Data Ethics Initiatives lead at the Northeastern Ethics Institute. He is also an affiliate of the Safra Center for Ethics and the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society both at Harvard University. He works in moral philosophy and the ethics of emerging technologies, especially the ethics of AI and ML. He has worked to develop and publish guidance about how to build ethics infrastructure and oversight tools for AI and how to operationalize values. He has also written on the nature and value of algorithmic transparency.