Founder of AI for Good, Kriti Sharma, wants to highlight the good work people including herself are doing to solve societal problems with the help of AI technologies.
One is improving women’s access to pre-natal healthcare in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “A pregnant woman has to walk 17 hours to her nearest, rural, prenatal clinic to get a check-up. What if she could get a diagnosis on her phone instead?” asked Sharma.
Another example is that of a woman in South Africa who is suffering domestic abuse. Sharma asked: “What could AI do for those one in three women? If it isn’t safe to talk out loud, they could get an AI service to raise the alarm or get financial and legal advice.”
She said that these great opportunities to use AI for the good of the world are often overshadowed by Hollywood-inspired media panic. She did admit, however, that there is serious cause for concern about the designers of AI continuing the status quo because this is resulting in humans having flawed decisions being made about us by machines.
Sharma (like me) has had to sit through thousands of pre-roll adverts for pregnancy tests on YouTube videos but sees this as an annoying result of an algorithm having made a decision about her based on her age, gender and other factors as an annoyance that won’t really affect her life chances.
Serious problems do arise for individuals and communities when algorithms make assumptions such as; ‘a Black or Latino person is less likely than a white person to pay off their loan on time’ and ‘a person called John makes a better programmer than a person called Mary’. The individual suffers an immediate negative outcome when such an assumption is applied to them and the community they belong to suffers as those historical decisions mean they will not be given a fair chance to prove themselves but will instead be tainted by association.
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