AI ethics in the real world: FTC commissioner shows a path toward economic justice
FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter lays out machine learning and AI’s potential for harm and outlines some ways for the FTC to counter it.
The proliferation of artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making has helped shape myriad aspects of our society: From facial recognition to deep fake technology to criminal justice and health care, their applications are seemingly endless. Across these contexts, the story of applied algorithmic decision-making is one of both promise and peril. Given the novelty, scale, and opacity involved in many applications of these technologies, the stakes are often incredibly high.
This is the introduction to FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter’s whitepaper: Algorithms and Economic Justice: A Taxonomy of Harms and a Path Forward for the Federal Trade Commission. If you have been keeping up with data-driven and algorithmic decision-making, analytics, machine learning, AI, and their applications, you can tell it’s spot on. The 63-page Whitepaper does not disappoint.
Slaughter worked on the whitepaper with her FTC colleagues Janice Kopec and Mohamad Batal. Their work was supported by Immuta, and it has just been published as part of the Yale Law School Information Society Project Digital Future Whitepapers series. The Digital Future Whitepaper Series, launched in 2020, is a venue for leading global thinkers to question the impact of digital technologies on law and society.
The series aims to provide academics, researchers, and practitioners a forum to describe novel challenges of data and regulation, to confront core assumptions about law and technology, and to propose new ways to align legal and ethical frameworks to the problems of the digital world.