"Stephen A. Schwarzman is chairman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone, an investment firm...
Too often, we think only about increasing our
competitiveness in terms of advancing the technology. But the effort
can’t just be about making AI more powerful. It must also be about
making sure AI has the right impact. AI’s greatest advocates describe
the Utopian promise of
a technology that will save lives, improve health and predict events we
previously couldn’t anticipate. AI’s detractors warn of a dystopian nightmare
in which AI rapidly replaces human beings at many jobs and tasks. If we
want to realize AI’s incredible potential, we must also advance AI in a
way that increases the public’s confidence that AI benefits society. We
must have a framework for addressing the impacts and the ethics.
What does an ethics-driven approach to AI look like?
It means asking not only whether AI be can used in certain circumstances, but should it?
Companies must take the lead in addressing key ethical questions surrounding AI. This includes exploring how to avoid biases in AI algorithms that can prejudice the way machines and platforms learn and behave and when to disclose the use of AI to consumers, how to address concerns about AI’s effect on privacy and responding to employee fears about AI’s impact on jobs.
As Thomas H. Davenport and Vivek Katyal argue in the MIT Sloan Management Review, we must also recognize that AI often works best with humans instead of by itself."
