Designing for Human Rights in AI  (Evgeni Aizenberg) - 1st AiTech Symposium

so hi everyone my name is Jani Eisenberg
and my approach I'm a postdoc at a tech
and my project is on designing for human
rights in AI as you've gathered now I'm
working together with you don't hold on
this and also you know so jumping right
in as we all know artificial
intelligence is rapidly growing in news
and the promise that we often hear and
that many of us have spent time working
in the past and in the present on these
technologies is to provide more evidence
driven decisions provide more efficiency
have more automation to hopefully let us
be more free to pursue the things that
we wish to pursue as humans and be less
busy with all kinds of mundane tasks
however does AI really live up to these
promises from what we see over the past
decade well unfortunately we have seen
over the past decade or so many examples
of the opposite this is an example that
you might have heard about of the
compass algorithm used in the United
States for assessment of risk that a
criminal defendant commits another crime
in the future and as this Republican
investigation has found in 2016 it it
was found to be twice as likely to
falsely label an african-american
defendant as high-risk compared to a
white defendant we have seen cases where
employee performance assessments
performed by algorithms result in firing
of talented employees like in the case
of Sarah vysotsky a schoolteacher in the
US who was highly valued by her fellow
teacher colleagues and parents of the
kids that she taught but when receiving
a low assessment score based on the test
scores of her students from that
specific year she was fired of course as
you mentioned we are all aware of the
shockwaves of the chem 'bridge
analytical scandal that has shaken the
the way we we live our election systems
and in an election cycles in our
democratic state right what all the
disinformation that is now bombarding us
on social media and the Internet and as
you might have heard and you'll
mentioned China is taking a very
particular direction on how they want to
use AI in their society we're in China
right now a whole social credit score
system is being implemented where every
citizen will receive a basically how
good how good of a good citizen are you
score based on all kinds of last amounts
of data from CCTV cameras to to you you
name it which can affect things like
your ability to purchase a train ticket
or a plane ticket or your ability to
send your kids to a school of your
choice and so forth so some of the major
social ethical issues surrounding AI
that we see are discrimination
unjustified unexplainable decisions
privacy infringement disinformation job
market effects of automation the anxiety
of people as to how their jobs are going
to be affected with more automation
taking place and of course safety now
what I would like to impress upon you
today with these examples is that these
technologies are of major consequence to
people's human rights and when I say
human rights I mean such fundamental
notions of human dignity freedom and
equality and in my view this is one of
the biggest challenges of our time it is
right up there second to the climate
crisis which all of us should be worried
about regardless of our occupation but
not far from the climate crisis is this
because of how disruptive this
technology can be and don't get me wrong
there's a lot of great things we can
accomplish with a
but if we get many things wrong about
how this technology impacts as you were
saying or freedom of choice and all of
those other dimensions it can be
immensely disruptive to our societies so
of course this has been getting
increasing attention over the past
decade both from the technological side
of the spectrum both from the social
science side the ethics of Technology
side
but unfortunately a lot of the technical
solutions which are developed to address
these issues such as fairness for
example yeah and discrimination
engineers often develop these solutions
without the society without the input of
societal stakeholders and so engineers
do often focus on the machine learning
model the input data and the output data
but the larger contextual contextual
information and the interpretation of
people who are affected by the
technology and use the technology is
often ignored at the same time what we
see is that calls for ethical AI point
out the issues but often fail to provide
answers on how do we proceed to fix that
bridging the socio technical divide is
what my project is about and in my
project I take a design for values
approach to doing so because of how
impactful say I is to people's human
rights what we want to do we want to use
human rights as top-level design
requirements in the kind of design
approach that you don't unfillable
talked about these should be the values
that guide the human centered design of
these systems the other critical
component of this approach is that we
then work together with the stakeholders
by engaging them through a range of
empirical methods from methodologies
like value sensitive design and
participatory design with a combination
of qualitative research and quantitative
research which is very important this is
where the
collaboration between disciplines comes
yes this is what we need each other as
engineers and social sciences to
translate what do human rights and their
implications mean in a specific context
of use in a specific system that you're
considering whether this is a decision
support algorithm in criminal justice
whether it's an automatic driving car
what's in that specific context the
interpretation of an abstract value and
then translate that into corresponding
technical requirements one comments
about what we mean here by human rights
so we make an explicit choice of
grounding the design roadmap in the EU
Charter of Fundamental Rights the values
of the foundation of these are the
values of the foundation of EU law and
they are dignity freedom equality and
solidarity of course this is not
exclusive to EU Member States
these values are shared by many cultures
in in in the West and at the outset we
should recognize that there will be
different value choices that are likely
in many other cultures and
socio-political systems so we want to
make clear we're not trying to impose
our view of society on on other
countries but we want to show how these
technologies can be designed over here
to support the values that we treasure
over here now to just give you a glimpse
of the benefits of the of and how how
was the structure of this of this
process imagined that we would want to
design for values which are at stake in
that criminal risk assessment case well
for the criminal defendants a important
human rights which is at stake of course
is obviously freedom and if we look in
the EU Charter in in the freedom
articles we have of course the right to
Liberty which in the context of criminal
justice one of its main implications is
that a person may not be subjected to an
arbitrary arrest if you arrest a person
that there needs to be a court with
standing evidence right you need to be
able to prove in court that there's the
rest of this person is warranted the
next question is how do you translate
that into a technical requirement well
in general this is an important moment
because in situations where there is no
obvious technical solution to support
that norm sometimes it would be a
stimulus for innovation because
historically we know that when faced
with moral dilemmas we produce some new
technologies that allow us to resolve
all of the dilemmas above but I want to
make the point that there will be
situations when norms can don't be
fulfilled with technology and the
responsible thing to do then is to stop
it is not an obvious thing that AI
should be introduced in every context
more AI is not always the right answer
and in that I want to say that
meaningful human control VI requires
from our from my vision eliciting
contextual design requirements by a
truly Co designing with stakeholders
engineers individuals affected by the AI
sections direct users field experts
policy experts and so forth moving
forward we want to engage in case
studies in which we implement this
vision in specific context and I'll be
glad to interact with you today to also
hear your ideas learn to communicate
efficiently across diverse backgrounds
and finally transition from these
studies to design protocols in specifics
societal domains just recall sure I want
to say that designing for human rights
should not be viewed as an obstacle on
the contrary I believe that it is key to
achieving innovative partnerships
between humans in AI and understanding
the roles that we can play together to
help in and humans benefit from more
human to human valuable human to human
interaction it is not an easy path to
tread because we need to learn to
communicate across all these different
disciplines which we represent but I
believe it'll bring long term benefits
to all stakeholders and with that I call
you to design together for Humanity
thank you very much thank you
thank you you have gaming
[Applause]