What Does an AI Ethicist Do?

The goal of the research initiative he heads is to develop a global perspective on tech ethics. In his previous job, O’Brien observed that different societies around the world have very different perspectives on privacy and ethics. Just within Europe, for example, U.K. citizens are willing to tolerate video camera monitoring on London’s central High Street, perhaps because of IRA bombings of the past, while Germans are much more privacy oriented, influenced by the former intrusions of East German Stasi spies. O’Brien suggested that in China, the public is tolerant of AI-driven applications like facial recognition and social credit scores at least in part because social order is a key tenet of Confucian moral philosophy. Microsoft’s AI ethics research project involves ethnographic analysis of different cultures, gathered through close observation of behaviors, and advice from external academics such as Erin Meyer of INSEAD, who wrote The Culture Map. It may result in a number of publications, depending on the findings. My feeling, and O’Brien’s as well, is that there aren’t a lot of sources out there on global tech ethics. This research could start to fill that gap. Within Microsoft, O’Brien is trying to extend the community of people who are focused on the ethics topic. He sent me a collection of materials suggesting that lots of people are already engaged. The materials include, for example, a blog post on Microsoft guidelines about developing responsible conversation bots (no doubt occasioned by the off-the-rails comments from the Tay AI chatbot research project in 2016). They also include a presentation and article on intelligible models in health care, and an internal project for a “learning door” that recognizes (with opt-in) who is coming in and out of Microsoft buildings. O’Brien said he works closely with Smith’s legal team and also has a matrixed reporting relationship to Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and director at Microsoft Research Labs. Of course, Microsoft is a big company, but awareness of AI ethics seems to be catching on rapidly and broadly there.