AI ethics groups are repeating one of society’s classic mistakes

New standards for AI clinical trials will help spot snake oil and hype 

Sponsored by IBM The Download Your daily dose of what's up in emerging technology 09.14.20 Good morning! Today: AI ethics groups need more diverse geographic representation, and new standards for AI clinical trials will help to spot snake oil and hype. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day. AI ethics groups are repeating one of society’s classic mistakes   The big picture: International organizations and corporations are racing to develop global guidelines for the ethical use of artificial intelligence. Declarations, manifestos, and recommendations are flooding the internet. But these efforts will be futile if they fail to account for the cultural and regional contexts in which AI operates. The problem: AI systems have repeatedly been shown to cause problems that disproportionately affect marginalized groups while benefiting a privileged few. The global AI ethics efforts underway today—of which there are dozens—aim to help everyone benefit from this technology, and to prevent it from causing harm. These groups are well-intentioned and are doing worthwhile work.  However… Without more diverse geographic representation, they’ll produce a global vision for AI ethics that reflects the perspectives of people in only a few regions of the world, particularly North America and northwestern Europe. If unaddressed, they risk developing standards that are, at best, meaningless and ineffective across all the world’s regions. At worst, these flawed standards will lead to more AI systems and tools that perpetuate existing biases and are insensitive to local cultures.  Read the full story written by Abhishek Gupta, the founder of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute and a machine-learning engineer at Microsoft, and Victoria Heath, a researcher at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute. New standards for AI clinical trials will help spot snake oil and hype The news: An international consortium of medical experts has introduced the first official standards for clinical trials that involve artificial intelligence. The new standards require AI researchers to describe the skills needed to use an AI tool, the setting in which the AI is evaluated, details about how humans interact with the AI, the analysis of error cases, and more. Why it matters: Randomized controlled trials are the most trustworthy way to demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of a treatment or clinical technique. But in the last few years, many new AI tools have been developed and described in medical journals, but their effectiveness has been hard to compare and assess because the quality of trial designs varies. Peak hype: A lack of common standards has also allowed private companies to crow about the effectiveness of their AI without facing the scrutiny applied to other types of medical intervention or diagnosis. By separating the good from the bad, the new standards will make independent evaluations easier, ultimately leading to better—and more trustworthy—medical AI. Read the full story.  —Will Douglas Heaven We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet 'em at me.)   + Have a giggle at the finalists of the Comedy Wildlife Photography Award.   + A baby goat, reunited with its folks.   + The man whose camera collection got...slightly out of hand.    + It’s been a record year for guitar sales. (NYT $)   + Sped up footage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launching and landing. Sponsor Message How blockchain helps build smarter supply chains There’s no way around it—modern supply chains are complex and rely on multiple parties and global networks to operate.     In most supply chains, communication is point-to-point, with no single, shared record of events across multiple parties. So when a B2B transaction goes awry, it can be stressful and time-consuming to identify the source before it leads to a potential dispute.   Learn how your organization can benefit from multi-party shared visibility and trust with a blockchain-enabled application built for the supply chain.   Read IBM’s point of view. The top ten must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Officials are now fighting misinformation as well as fires Everything about this is just… so wearying. (NYT $)   + Fires in the Arctic Circle will have a particularly devastating impact. (Nature)   + We know how to prevent megafires. Why isn't anyone listening? (ProPublica)   + People’s phones are filtering out the apocalyptic-looking orange sky. (The Atlantic)   + How to protect yourself from the smoke. (Quartz)   + San Francisco’s planning process lets one person hold up eco-friendly projects in the midst of a climate crisis. (San Francisco Chronicle)   2 Oracle has won a contract to host TikTok’s US operations This does not look like a sale. (WSJ $)   + Microsoft dodged a bullet by “losing.” (Quartz)   + Beijing had made it clear it would rather TikTok was forced to close in the US than be sold. (Reuters)   3 Dining out is one of the riskiest activities you can do right now, says the CDC Close contact, poorly ventilated rooms, and loud talking is a recipe for disaster. (CNBC)   + The conceptual errors America keeps making on covid-19. (The Atlantic)   + We need to prepare to very closely scrutinize any approved vaccine. (Wired $)   + Kenyans are dying of coronavirus at far lower rates than the rest of the world. (Quartz)   + Israel is locking down again. (Axios)   4 England’s contact tracing app is finally launching this month Version 2.0 goes live on September 24. (TechCrunch)   + The UK isn’t testing as many people as it’s making out. (The Sunday Times)   + The big problem with the UK government’s plan for mass testing? False positives. (Wired UK)   + Police in the UK fined a man nearly $13,000 for hosting a huge house party. (BBC)   5 Inside the Trump 2020 app It collects tons of data—crucially, that includes cellphone numbers. (New Yorker $)   + It's a voter surveillance tool of extraordinary power. (TR)   6 Are tech stocks about to crash? 📈 The market is looking pretty manic right now. (The Guardian)   7 Casino apps are a disaster for gambling addicts Lawsuits are helping some of them to claw back the hundreds of thousands of dollars they lost. (NBC)   8 What we can learn from the world’s largest fully remote company This is the biggest shift to working life in decades—but will it last? (Fast Company)   + Should we be working fewer hours? (FT)   9 Feds claimed they’d seized fake AirPods. They had not. 😬 Well, this is embarrassing. (The Verge)   10 Watch out for coronavirus scams The latest one tells people they’ve “violated quarantine.” (The Verge) Access, not academics.  Tap into the collective brain power of MIT when you purchase a subscription today. Take a stand "To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust. I had been lying to people… unwittingly." —Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, tells NPR that most plastic is not recycled, despite industry claims to the contrary. Top image credit: Getty Please send Gibson Les Paul guitars to hi@technologyreview.com. Follow me on Twitter at @charlottejee. Thanks for reading! —Charlotte Was this newsletter forwarded to you, and you'd like to see more? Sign up for free Leading with Innovation. Join us online, October 19-22. *View this in a browser You received this newsletter because you subscribed with your email address *Edit email preferences   |   *Unsubscribe from all emails Follow us: MIT Technology Review One Main Street Cambridge, MA 02142

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