Top takeaways from the Global Symposium on AI and Inclusion

From November 8–10th, 2017, I had the privilege of attending the Global Symposium on AI and Inclusion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 🇧🇷🤖💫🌏

On behalf of the Global Network of Internet and Society Centers, this event was co-organised by the Institute for Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro (ITS Rio) and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University with the support of the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and the Open Society Foundations.

The main aim was to identify, map, understand, and address the manifold issues around AI and Inclusion from an interdisciplinary perspective. About 200 participants from around the world representing advocacy, philanthropy, media, policy, and industry attended to address both the opportunities and challenges of AI-based technologies through the lens of inclusion, broadly conceived.

The venue was the astounding Museum of Tomorrow, Rio de Janeiro.

6 key takeaways about the current state of Artificial Intelligence:

1. Artificial Intelligence is already powering a lot of services around us. It’s presence is only bound to increase. AI trains using the massive amounts of data that we produce.
2. Much of AI innovation is opaque. Currently, a lot happens in the ‘black box’ — internal systems that are proprietary to companies /governments building it. The algorithms reflect the biases of its makers, it is trained on messy data sets that reflect systemic problems in society and the consequences are often hard to predict/detect till much later.
3. AI systems transcend national and cultural borders. It’s consequences will impact all areas of society. We have to be proactive about inclusion in all its complexity for this to be a fair system. Representation of the Global South and vulnerable populations are crucial in the decision-making process when building culturally contextualised solutions.
4. It affects ALL of us, regardless of how much technology we use currently. Often when we speak about AI, it’s about either killer robots or whether AI will solve all our problems. We need to move past these extreme narratives and have constructive and critical conversations about our collective futures.
5. The future capacity of AI systems may impact the world at the scale of agricultural or industrial revolutions (Source: Ethically aligned design by IEEE) Whether this change will be a positive one will depend on how we shape it. Conceptualising and implementing this will require active communication and collaboration between academia, industry, government bodies, civil societies and citizens.
6. We have a small window of time while we can still guide this in a collectively desirable direction. This window is closing soon. You can keep yourself informed right away with this reading list on AI and Inclusion compiled for the event [Public].

Symposium info book

The organisers did a fantastic job of engaging the participants to co-create a multi-disciplinary, international perspective of how AI is evolving. Overall, I came out of the experience with a richer understanding of AI and inspired by the passion and breadth of investigation going into addressing these topics. We all agreed to make this discussion more public. This post is just a start.

BKC Harvard, ITS Rio and Museum of Tomorrow teams — a lot of effort went into the logistics of global representation and they delivered with a smile.

Personally, the symposium re-emphasised the need to tighten the knowledge exchange between academia and industry. My first commitment to give back is through the Anticipatory ethics for AI playbook+canvas I am building as part of my Digital Experience Design MA at Hyper Island. It is a tool for teams building AI products and systems to proactively identify the human repercussions of their work. A few other projects are in the pipeline, which will be announced in due course.

Also check out ‘The real danger of AI, it’s not what you think’ by João Duarte, a fellow participant.

Thanks to Digital Asia Hub for the opportunity to be part of this enriching community. And Hyper Island Industry Research project which was the starting point of this journey.

What excites or bugs you about Artificial Intelligence? Did you come across any exciting ventures or ideas that brought you to the edge of your seat? What do you want to know more about? Share your thoughts in the comments and let’s start that conversation right here.

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