The House of Lords’ Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence has this week published a report, AI in the UK: ready, willing and able? (PDF).
The report concludes that the UK is in a strong position to be a world leader in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), and that the best way to do this is to put ethics at the centre of AI’s development and use.
It sets a clear agenda for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport's new Centre for Data Ethics, including guidance on making AI intelligible (para 106), improved data sharing (paras 82, 85 & 87), and developing an AI ethics code (para 420).
The RSS welcomes the call for an AI ethics code and has, for a number of years, advocated the creation of a centre for data ethics and successfully lobbied for the establishment of the new Ada Lovelace Institute.
RSS president Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter appeared before the Select Committee back in November 2017 and is quoted a number of times in the report, mainly in response to questions around securing public trust in AI systems by successfully communicating how they work.