Joi Ito and Iyad Rahwan on AI & Society
Channel: The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Date: 13/04/2017

AI technologies have the potential to vastly enhance the performance of many systems and institutions, from making transportation safer, to enhancing the accuracy of medical diagnosis, to improving the efficiency of food safety inspections. However, AI systems can also create moral hazards, by potentially diminishing human accountability, perpetuating biases that are inherent to the AI's training data, or optimizing for one performance measure at the expense of others. These challenges require new kinds of "user interfaces" between machines and society. We explore these issues, and how they would interface with existing institutions.

About Joi Ito

Joi Ito is the director of the MIT Media Lab, Professor of the Practice at MIT and the author, with Jeff Howe, of Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future (Grand Central Publishing, 2016). 

Ito is chairman of the board of PureTech Health and serves on several other boards, including The New York Times Company, Sony Corporation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation. He is also the former chairman and CEO of Creative Commons, and a former board member of ICANN, The Open Source Initiative, and The Mozilla Foundation. 

Ito is a serial entrepreneur who helped start and run numerous companies including one of the first web companies in Japan, Digital Garage, and the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan, PSINet Japan/IIKK. He has been an early-stage investor in many companies, including Formlabs, Flickr, Kickstarter, littleBits, and Twitter.

Ito has received numerous awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Golden Plate Award from the Academy of Achievement, and he was inducted into the SXSW Interactive Festival Hall of Fame in 2014. 

Ito has been awarded honorary doctorates from The New School and Tufts University.

About Iyad Rahwan

Iyad Rahwan is the AT&T Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Scalable Cooperation group. A native of Aleppo, Syria, Rahwan holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and is an affiliate faculty at the MIT Institute of Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). Rahwan's work lies at the intersection of the computer and social sciences, with a focus on collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation, and the social aspects of Artificial Intelligence. His team built the Moral Machine, which has collected 28 million decisions to-date about how autonomous cars should prioritize risk. Rahwan's work appeared in major academic journals, including Science and PNAS, and was featured in major media outlets, including the New York Times, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/04/Ito