IBM and Ethical AI: Are Wrong Answers Acceptable? But What Is Incorrect?
April 28, 2020
IBM can be surprising. A new president, the fizzle of IBM Watson’s Houston cancer initiative, and the blaming of the firm’s financial woes on Covid19.
Have these issues dampened IBM’s taste for grandstanding?
“IBM’s Pandemic Plan: Supercomputing, New Inventions and Tracking Employees” illustrates what may be the company’s fresh, new approach to becoming really, really relevant.
According to the write up, IBM signed the Pope’s call for AI Ethics. The IBM executive tapped to be the thought leader for ethics, a murky, contentious Philosophy 101 concept, is John Kelly III, an executive charged with making the IBM Watson Health unit perform like a Seal Team 6 professional.
Here are a couple of observations Mr. Kelly made in an interview, which comprise the core of the article cited above:
Here’s one about the value of AI, supercomputing, and great leadership:
We said, “Here’s more compute power than anybody’s ever had access to, for free: Go find solutions to the problems.” They told us that the rate of discovery is just off the charts.
The only hitch in the git along is that none of the AI wizards, including IBM’s and its computing power, has delivered a fix for the virus. In fact, the lack of tangible results makes the virtue signaling claims of IBM and others look silly.
How about this statement?
The trouble is that when you lift the hood, everybody’s reporting it in a different way. We used artificial intelligence two to four times a day to scrape all of their data, which is in different formats — sometimes it’s an Excel file, sometimes it’s a PDF, sometimes it’s a handwritten piece of paper — we scrape it, and then we post it, just like we post a weather map. We post a coronavirus map by county in the U.S.
The problem is that one of the more useful methods of displaying virus-related data comes from Avi Schiffmann, a teenager in Seattle, developed NCoV2019.live. Also the founders of Instagram have delivered Rt Covid 19, which is quite useful. Neither service has supercomputers, Watson, or the Weather Channel to help. Maybe IBM should hire these people? The bottom-line is that IBM can do sort of what social media innovators and a high school junior did. Come on, IBM.
I circled this IBM statement in yellow:
We’ve taken the position that it has to be an opt-in. We should not — based on those ethical principles from the Vatican — track people’s locations, and I should not try to find out that you were next to Adam last Tuesday night, for example. It’s not ethical.
Maybe Mr. Kelly has not read the email about IBM’s cyber division, checked out the Analyst Notebook feature set, or probed into the IBM CyberTap system? DarkCyber wonders, “Are there different definitions of ethics for each unit of IBM?”
And, finally, this statement is intriguing:
The coronavirus, as bad as it is, it’s not Ebola, as an example.
With research data in flux, it is interesting to consider why an IBM VP would offer this clear differentiation. What other distinctions can IBM draw between Covid19 and Ebola? In fact, what did IBM do in the midst of the Ebola outbreaks?
Is IBM ethical? Just ask one of the professionals over 55 RIFFed in the last few years? Is Watson ethical if it outputs incorrect or misleading information about a cancer protocol? Is it ethical to buy back stock to put a shine on a pick up truck designed to deliver mainframes?
Let’s go back to the teen in Seattle. Maybe he could be hired to put IBM Watson to work?
Stephen E Arnold, April 28, 2020
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