Yesterday, Google’s Senior Vice President of Global Affairs, Kent Walker, announced the launch of a global advisory council that was created to offer guidance on ethical issues that relate to artificial intelligence and its related technologies, as well as to inform future decisions.
The council was first announced at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference, organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later in a Google blog post by Walker.
This follows June 2018’s announcement of Google’s AI principles, which they described as an ethical charter to help guide the responsible development and use of AI technology in both their research, and their products.
The Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC) will “consider some of Google’s most complex challenges that arise under our AI Principles” wrote Walker in a Google blog post announcing the launch of the council.
The ATEAC consists of 8 members from different educational and professional backgrounds, including: Bubacarr Bah, a leading applied and computational mathematician; former US deputy secretary of state William Joseph Burns; De Kai, who is a leading natural language processing researcher; and Joanna Bryson who is a professor of computer sciences at the University of Bath.
In the blog announcement, Walker revealed that the ATEAC would have its first meeting in April, and that three subsequent meetings would occur throughout 2019, and these will center on discussions about how to use emerging and developing technologies such as facial recognition.
