In May last year, a stunning report claimed that a computer program used by a US court for risk assessment was biased against black prisoners. Last year, according to global management consultant McKinsey, tech companies spent somewhere between $20bn and $30bn on AI, mostly in research and development. It has led to a decade-long AI arms race in which the UK government is offering six-figure salaries to computer scientists. (“It’s impossible to know how widely adopted AI is now, but I do know we can’t go back,” one computer scientist says.) But as the algorithms learn and adapt from their original coding, they become more opaque and less predictable.

Source: The Guardian August 08, 2017 06:00 UTC