AI will benefit us, if regulated

Stephen Hawking had famously warned that full Artificial Intelligence (AI) could spell the end of the human race. Such a dystopic end is hard to believe. Perhaps, we will never get that far.

But AI is getting fairly good at impersonating humans. While AI is nowhere close to passing the Turing test, there are bots that write like us, sound like us, look like us, and even make music like us. This opens up the world to widespread socio-political problems. It’s time to build a robust framework for regulating AI. There are good reasons for it.

AI is at the heart of global power struggles. US and China have been locked in a fight for AI supremacy, while small yet highly digital countries like Singapore and the UAE have bet on AI for competitive advantage. We have precedence of science getting dragged into geopolitics. The race to acquire nuclear weapons knowhow defined the cold war as the world was perilously balanced on the doctrine of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). Countries have attached a similar value on AI for long-term leverage.

Yet, the industry is afraid that sweeping regulatory laws will have a chilling effect on innovation. Having grown up in a regulated India, my peers have viewed regulation with strong suspicion, if not contempt. Yet the lack of regulation gave birth to the Internet.

In the US, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996 is believed to have cleared the deck for the rise of the Internet. It ensured that websites were not liable for content posted by their visitors. While the law did protect the fledgling Internet, we all know how that played out 20 years later. A 16-month US congressional investigation of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook has found them to hold monopoly power. The 451-page report says that they expanded their dominance through self-preferencing, predatory pricing, and exclusionary conduct.

Big Tech is the epicentre of AI innovation, which it licenses to other businesses. It enjoys the virtuous cycle of using customer data from such licensed services to further improve its machine learning models. It has snagged top AI researchers from universities, sometimes hiring entire departments. AI will allow a handful of companies and countries to hold a dominant position. It will also give the powerful tools to the dark web for criminal activities. Machine learning in particular needs to be constantly audited and monitored.

Yet, not everyone is convinced. EU regulators are already being criticised for focusing too much on regulation at the cost of innovation. A 2017 paper titled Artificial Intelligence and Public Policy published by Mercatus Center of George Mason University made a case against precautionary regulation of nascent AI. Three years later, we have a whiff of how well AI can produce original text in OpenAI’s latest model. Progressive Generative Adversarial Networks can be trained to produce an entirely new face that looks eerily human.

If AI regulation is delayed, then we run the risk of ‘regulatory capture’, when regulators serve the interests of entities they intend to regulate. Mark Zuckerberg has conveniently called for the regulation of the Internet because it will help to keep out competition for well-entrenched Facebook. In the absence of a clear demarcation between the producers and the consumers, and data moving in a cross-border environment, regulation is now tough without international cooperation.

Governments and the research fraternity agree that AI is showing bias. The recent AI summit hosted by the Indian government was essentially a public discourse on responsible AI. Amazon had to terminate its AI recruitment tool that trained itself to be biased against women. Bias in AI will place a new prejudiced filter on our digital life.

We can take pointers from the US antitrust report on Big Tech that has recommended more resources to antitrust agencies and new laws. The report has acknowledged the failure of antitrust agencies to take corrective actions on crucial occasions when the monopolistic digital platforms killed their competition. The law should have been updated once the socio-political ramification of radical social media content was in plain sight.

Laws need to be nuanced to walk the fine line between innovation and misuse. Malpractices like willful impersonation by bots, and risks in autonomous AI and brain-computer interface should be clearly defined. Policy makers need to define specific actions against such risks. Smart Dubai’s AI Ethics Advisory Board has discussed diagnostic tools for ethical AI. EU has proposed an ecosystem of trust to monitor risks. We need to start with high risk sectors like finance, automotive and healthcare. Setting mere norms are no longer enough.

Removing bias and lies, and instituting accountability and human oversight is core to regulating AI. This can only be done when countries start to cooperate with one another and build a common framework for regulation.

Shalini Verma is CEO of PIVOT technologies

Published at Sun, 11 Oct 2020 20:37:30 +0000

BlackBerry partners with ServiceNow to for incident response management

BlackBerry has announced it has entered into a partnership with ServiceNow to integrate the BlackBerry AtHoc service within the Now platform for rapid crisis communications and IT service management.

By integrating BlackBerry AtHoc into the Now Platform workflow stack, IT operations teams will be able to leverage multiple communications channels in the case of an incident, allowing for more efficient and secure communication. According to BlackBerry, this leads to higher levels of collaboration with the wider business to maintain efficiency, productivity and profitability.

“With this partnership, IT teams will have the ability to alert and assemble a best-in-class crisis team to troubleshoot and resolve any issue such as a critical service outage or an interruption to service, directly within the ServiceNow interface on the Now Platform,” the company says in a statement.

“Not needing to leave the platform removes the friction of multiple windows and open applications to allow faster incident response and better management of the problem.”

Teams will also be able to monitor the audit log to conduct a post-mortem review of the incident response.

“We understand that our customers spend a lot of time on the ServiceNow platform planning for and developing workflows to meet their business needs,” says Ramon Pinero, vice president of BlackBerry AtHoc Services, BlackBerry.

“With BlackBerry AtHoc embedded into their ServiceNow workflows, customers can now seamlessly send timely and secure notifications about critical events, such as service outages and new return to work guidelines to its users without having to switch from the ServiceNow experience, thereby minimising disruptions to the organisation and reducing overall recovery time.”

Matt Schvimmer, senior vice president and general manager of ITSM Business Unit at ServiceNow, says the partnership pairs together “two best of breed players to offer world-class, secure incident response management within a comprehensive digital workflow”.

“We are delighted to have BlackBerry AtHoc as a trusted partner and look forward to offering our customers AtHoc capabilities directly from our App Store,” he says.

BlackBerry AtHoc allows organisations to safely and securely communicate with their workforce and other organisations through any device. BlackBerry AtHoc leverages the power of mobility, hybrid cloud, and the IP network to deliver a unified and secure end-to-end solution capable of real-time collaboration, keeping critical business operations running.

BlackBerry hosted its annual Security Summit this week, where industry experts and thought leaders from across the globe discussed a range of topics, including security in a remote working world, business continuity, Zero Trust/zero touch, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and crisis communications for employee safety.

Published at Sun, 11 Oct 2020 19:07:30 +0000