Error-prone or biased artificial-intelligence systems have the potential to taint our social ecosystem in ways that are initially hard to detect, harmful in the long term, and expensive - or even impossible - to reverse.
Interpretation
Artificial intelligence can negatively affect society in subtle and lasting ways that may be difficult to correct.
Kate Crawford's quote emphasizes the dangers associated with biased or unreliable artificial intelligence systems, highlighting how their impacts can be insidious and hard to identify at first. Over time, these negative effects can become deeply entrenched within our social structures, leading to consequences that may be costly or even irreversible, thus underscoring the importance of vigilance and oversight in the development and deployment of AI technologies.
In practice
In a public debate about AI regulations, this quote can emphasize the need for cautious development.
If you're not thinking about the way systemic bias can be propagated through the criminal justice system or predictive policing, then it's very likely that, if you're designing a system based on historical data, you're going to be perpetuating those biases.
We need to be vigilant about how we design and train these machine-learning systems, or we will see ingrained forms of bias built into the artificial intelligence of the future.
As we move into an era in which personal devices are seen as proxies for public needs, we run the risk that already-existing inequities will be further entrenched. Thus, with every big data set, we need to ask which people are excluded. Which places are less visible? What happens if you live in the shadow of big data sets?
Only by developing a deeper understanding of AI systems as they act in the world can we ensure that this new infrastructure never turns toxic.
It is a failure of imagination and methodology to claim that it is necessary to experiment on millions of people without their consent in order to produce good data science.
The fear isn't that big data discriminates. We already know that it does. It's that you don't know if you've been discriminated against.
For thousands of years, until about 1850, you see humans accumulating more and more power by the invention of new technologies and by new systems of organization in the economy and in politics, but you don't see any real improvement in the well-being of the average person.
Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.
Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.
Our values are that we do think that people have a right to privacy. And that our customers are not our products.
There's always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It's long since passed that a typical person doesn't leave footprints.
Nintendo is a company of Kyoto craftsmen, and what we don't want to do is, if we know we can make something better, we don't want to leave that behind.
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