Vanguard Magazine

36 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020 www.vanguardcanada.com teChNOLOgy aI, EThICS and CopYRIghT the intrusion of Arti- ficiAl intelligence (Ai) into our dAily lives hAs rAised mAjor ques- tions of ethics Among reseArchers, compA- nies thAt Are develop- ing And using Ai, And of course consumers. A lready algorithms play an important if largely invis- ible role in our daily affairs, controlling everything from how our tax returns are as- sessed, to the ads that we receive online, to our insurability and calculation of life expectancy….and of course many, many more applications. Efforts to combat CO- VID-19 is the latest manifestation of this, from self-assessment tools put online by various jurisdictions in North America to the app used in some Chinese cities that assigns a green/yellow/red code to per- sonal cellphones. Without a green code, free movement is impossible. The app is apparently linked to police databases and tracks movements, yet another example of algorithm "mission creep", even if the goal on this occasion is understandable. But algorithms, seemingly ubiquitous these days, are only a stepping stone on the way to Artificial Intelligence. There are many definitions of AI but es- sentially it involves allowing machines to assess and interpret data and thus to make decisions that in the past would have been made by humans. Algorithms usually fuel the machine learning process so that true AI goes beyond just interpreting data. It allows the machine to "learn" from the data (discerning patterns) and in so doing improves its prediction and problem-solv- ing capacities, and sometimes even to cre- ate something entirely new. So how does all this affect ethics, and more specifically the subject of this blog, copyright? The ethics of AI is a huge issue, most recently raised at Davos by a group of tech CEOs including Sundhar Pichai of Google. Pichai argued for government regulation of AI in order to control its potentially nefarious uses, of which facial recognition technology is the most recent example of an application raising wide- spread concern. A number of large com- panies that use and develop AI have rec- ognized the need to set out guidelines on use. There could be various motivations for this, ranging from wanting to rein in rogue operators who could gain an unfair competitive advantage, to recognizing the By hugh stePheNs

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