thoughts about ethical ai research

22/03/2019

We’ve got to start moving a lot more slowly in the next couple years, because the community can be very toxic for anything we do, as well as the actual products at stake.

That being said, I think the community is going to need some great leadership development. If you’re working on a project that has some really good data, the people running it will need people to explain what that data is, and how a data set ought to be shared, whether it’s for medical use or data that could affect people’s lives or their own health for those who are affected by diseases such as diabetes, cancer, HIV, etc.

It probably doesn’t have to be like that just yet, but I also think there might be more opportunities that we can work with, because it’s sort of obvious that a lot of the science data you guys are talking about right now probably isn’t ready in the way that our best competitors, companies like Nvidia, Samsung, I think, really want to.

I mean, one of the things that you can look forward to will be when the FDA takes a look at whether we’ve adequately defined the medical use of these datasets, which means you’ve got to find this kind of data at the top of the list of really relevant data because it’s pretty clear that there’s not the right scientific basis for the conclusions that you’re trying to reach from those datasets. The sooner we start getting to those data, the more likely that we’ll get to say to other researchers, “Please, at this point, we don’t know how well this data will be useful to our patients or their providers.”

At any point in time, we might be able to look at the data, but then there’s going to be the possibility that we’ll have to wait until the next study — and that’s also a big, big question we’re going to have to answer in the next couple years — that we’re going to have to work hard to find the most appropriate data source to use when that study comes out.

So I think we’re going to need real leadership over the next several years in the way that some of the other organizations that have made significant progress in the past, like Google, have put in place really well-documented practices about sharing medical data on the internet, and also about how we can take that data from these data providers and make it more easily shared with other people, as well as make it more transparent with the healthcare system. But until we have that