Artificial Tikkun Olam: AI Can Be Our Best Friend in Building an Open Human-Computer Society

TL;DR

This paper discusses societal risks of AI and other technologies, emphasizing the need for specialized monitoring and proposing AI-driven solutions and interdisciplinary centers to address fairness and bias issues.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-tier architecture for mitigating AI societal risks and advocates for interdisciplinary research centers to proactively address technology-related challenges.

Findings

AI systems can help develop solutions for fairness and bias.

A proposed simple societal impact quotient for AI.

Recommendation for interdisciplinary centers to study future technological risks.

Abstract

Technological advances of virtually every kind pose risks to society including fairness and bias. We review a long-standing wisdom that a widespread practical deployment of any technology may produce adverse side effects misusing the knowhow. This includes AI but AI systems are not solely responsible for societal risks. We describe some of the common and AI specific risks in health industries and other sectors and propose both broad and specific solutions. Each technology requires very specialized and informed tracking, monitoring and creative solutions. We postulate that AI systems are uniquely poised to produce conceptual and methodological solutions to both fairness and bias in automated decision-making systems. We propose a simple intelligent system quotient that may correspond to their adverse societal impact and outline a multi-tier architecture for producing solutions of increasing complexity to these risks. We also propose that universities may consider forming interdisciplinary Study of Future Technology Centers to investigate and predict the fuller range of risks posed by technology and seek both common and AI specific solutions using computational, technical, conceptual and ethical analysis