In this episode, I have a conversation with Arash Rahnama, Head of Applied AI Research at Modzy (@arashrahnamaphd, @getmodzy, www.modzy.com). We talk about techniques for providing explainability in AI, how to pair explainability with fairness to reduce bias, how AI goes wrong and how diverse teams can provide important prior knowledge to AI systems and help govern them in the wild.

In this episode, I have a conversation with Scott Stephenson, Co-founder and CEO of Deepgram, a company which has built an end-to-end deep learning speech recognition system. We talk about why end-to-end deep learning sets Deepgram apart from other speech recognition companies, how Deepgram handles accents and bias, how enterprise speech recognition differs from consumer and Deepgram’s goal of becoming a speech understanding company.

In this episode, I have the pleasure of talking with Will Griffin, Chief Ethics Officer of Hypergiant, an Austin Texas-based AI product and services company. We talk about how Hypergiant uses Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative in its ethics framework, how Hypergiant applies its ethics process with clients and why Will thinks ethical processes are important in AI development.

In this episode, I have the pleasure of interviewing Chelsea Barabas a PhD candidate at MIT’s Media Lab. We talk about her work on bias in the criminal justice system as well as her most recent work applying the concept of “studying up” from anthropology to the data science world.

Here are some of the links we refer to in the episode:

http://www.chelsbar.com

https://cmsw.mit.edu/profile/chelsea-barabas/

https://medium.com/@chelsea_barabas

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/opinion/pretrial-ai.html

https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/ca31.3.01/367

https://discardstudies.com/2016/08/08/ethnographic-refusal-a-how-to-guide/

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6464/421/tab-article-info

In this episode, Dave interviews Helen about her recent article in Quartz, “Are AI ethicists making any difference?” Some of the topics we explore include:

* Why is there a rush to hire AI ethicists in the tech industry?

* What do AI ethicists do?

* Why are people skeptical and what is “ethics washing” and “ethics bashing?”

* What does Jacob Metcalf of Data & Society mean by saying that ethics is “the vessel which we use to hold our values?”

* What does Josh Lovejoy of Microsoft mean by saying that ethics need not be seen as a philosophical add-on “but as just good design?”

* What are AI checklists and why is their use good practice?

In this episode, we dive into the paradox of autonomy. Some of the topics we explore include:

* Why are there so many paradoxical observations in AI?

* What is the autonomy paradox?

* Is there any way that giving up more information can be autonomy-enhancing?

* What are principal reason and counter-factual explanations?

* How can we deal with the autonomy paradox through AI UX design?

For further reading, check out the most recent Artificiality article, the research paper we reference and the Buzzfeed article on Clearview AI.

Special thanks to our friend, Jonathan Coulton, for our theme music.

Take a listen as we take a deep dive into the paradox of personalization.