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  • WORLD VIEW

Don’t let industry write the rules for AI

BERJAYA
Technology companies are running a campaign to bend research and regulation for their benefit; society must fight back, says Yochai Benkler.
By
  1. Yochai Benkler

    1. Yochai Benkler is a law professor and co-directs the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Industry has mobilized to shape the science, morality and laws of artificial intelligence. On 10 May, letters of intent are due to the US National Science Foundation (NSF) for a new funding programme for projects on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence, in collaboration with Amazon. In April, after the European Commission released the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, an academic member of the expert group that produced them described their creation as industry-dominated “ethics washing”. In March, Google formed an AI ethics board, which was dissolved a week later amid controversy. In January, Facebook invested US$7.5 million in a centre on ethics and AI at the Technical University of Munich, Germany.

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Nature 569, 161 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01413-1

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