World needs ethical, responsible Artificial Intelligence: Satya Nadella

indica News Bureau –

 

Given the potential for abuse of the fast advancing Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had once again urged all the stakeholders to build AI-based tools and solutions in an ethical and responsible way.

In a tweet, Nadella said the industry has seen how AI can be applied for good, “but we must also guard against its unintended consequences”.

“Now is the time to examine how we build AI responsibly and avoid a race to the bottom. This requires both the private and public sectors to take action,” the Microsoft CEO tweeted.

A strong advocate of ethical AI, Nadella recently said that recent advances in AI have been “pretty stunning” but what the humanity is going to see soon will be even more profound across the spectrum.

Nadella said that the potential is for us to be able to turn every industry into an AI-first industry, be it retail, healthcare or agriculture.

“Microsoft has been working on fundamental AI breakthroughs for over 20 years and some of the advances, especially as measured by our ability to have human parity in a lot of these perception and language capabilities is pretty stunning.

“It’s happening because of the ability to provision lots of compute capability, to have lots of data, and these new techniques of algorithm promise around deep neural net in particular,” Nadella told the gathering at a recent event in Las Vegas.

He was echoing the views of Microsoft President Brad Smith who said in a blog post that governments across the world need to start adopting laws to regulate the AI technology in 2019.

“The time for action has arrived,” he said, adding that the industry must also exercise restraint while using the AI-enabled facial recognition technology.

Microsoft is one of several companies playing a leading role in developing facial recognition technology.

According to Nadella, “for us to be able to turn every industry into an AI-first industry, whether it’s retail or healthcare or agriculture, we want to be able to make sure that they can take their data, in a security-privacy preserving way, convert that into AI capability that they get the return on. That’s really the objective.”

In a recent interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Nadella emphasized, “we need to have more dialogue around the ethics, the principles that we can use for the engineers and companies that are building AI.

“So that the choices we make don’t cause us to create systems with bias – that’s the tangible thing we should be working on,” Nadella said.

For him, AI has a much bigger role in providing inclusive growth and accessibility for over one billion people.

Harnessing the power of AI to help people with disabilities, Microsoft recently announced “AI for Accessibility” — a new $25 million, five-year program for developers globally, including in India.

The program will put AI tools in the hands of developers to accelerate the development of accessible and intelligent AI solutions for people with disabilities.

“It is important for us to figure out how to empower more people. It has been a personal passion of mine to help people suffering with disabilities like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and autism,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during “Build 2018”, the company’s annual developers’ conference.

“AI for Accessibility is a grand program for the researchers, NGOs and developers — providing them with platform technologies so that they can help over one billion people with disabilities,” Nadella added.

 

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