A Call to Arms for Trustworthy AI: Can we trust Artificial Intelligence?
People and organizations around the world are asking, ”Can we trust artificial intelligence?”.
I know this because I’ve spent the last two and a half years circling the globe helping organizations strategize, architect, and action their way towards the promised benefits on the AI horizon. And that is what I hear in country after country, organization after organization, leader after leader and colleague after colleague in every group I stand before helping them see this through:
Can we trust artificial intelligence?
Sure, can we trust AI to be responsible, to generate accurate, trustworthy responses to our prompts?
But look more deeply and you will find that truly Trustworthy AI is about so much more.
Do we trust that our investments in AI are wise, that we are not throwing effort and money after nonsense?
Do we trust that we are moving rigorously, purposefully, and efficiently towards AI’s promised land?
Do we trust that we are selecting AI capabilities—tools, models, technologies—that are not just superior to alternatives in the aggregate but also appropriate to our organization and our purpose?
Do we trust that we have put in place the apps, data, security, governance, compliance required to achieve our AI aspirations?
Do we trust our ability to scale the investments we’re making, both technologically and culturally, within our organizations?
In today’s world of all-too-often declining trust in institutions, governments, and humanity writ large, can we trust AI to be applied and used for the good of our colleagues, our neighbors, and of all humankind?
How do we realize AI’s transformative potential in the realms of science, medicine, engineering, and productivity across the economy while not sacrificing our institutions, our culture, our communities, our human rights to its use?
We must prevent AI’s maladies graduating from the realm of inaccuracy to significant financial calamity, and again from financialy calamity to the facilitation of—for example—cyber crime or sex trafficking.
On the 12th of September 1962 at Rice University in Texas, in one of the most astonishingly brilliant speeches ever recorded, America’s President Kennedy rallied his fellow citizens to what he called the “high costs and hardships, as well as high reward” of their nation’s exploration of space. He proclaimed:
“For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man… I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.”
It is a brilliant speech, and I believe required viewing for anyone in need of a moral compass in today’s beleaguered world, to say nothing for those of us working in and around artificial intelligence.
Enjoy.
You see, to be trustworthy, AI must be guided, constrained, and put to task by the human compass. In more practical terms, Trustworthy AI is about creating the structures, about building digital ecosystems that are strategic, responsible, safe, reliable, and scalable for the Age of AI.
But how?
Most organizations don’t have a clue where to start, but are eager to safely harness AI. Trustworthy AI enables organizations to make wise, strategic investments. These organizations scale as they differentiate themselves in the market and deliver higher quality to customers (or their citizens). Responsible use of AI reduces risk amidst confusing laws and regulations that are different everywhere. The workforce and workplace culture is more productive when empowered with the most reliable AI tools.
Whether in seizing opportunity or in avoiding calamity, the achievement of Trustworthy AI is an effort that must be shouldered by every user, every leader, and every organization that wishes to survive and thrive in the coming age.
Last year I led a team who wrote and published the AI Strategy Framework, which set forth five pillars and twenty-five dimensions of what I view to be a comprehensive, holistic approach to Trustworthy AI. For we have come to understand that AI cannot be truly trustworthy if not adopted and used in the context of these dimensions.
We have come to understand that AI cannot be truly trustworthy if not adopted and used in the context of these twenty-five dimensions.
To be sure, you cannot achieve maturity in each dimension before widely using AI. The framework is a guide, not a pre-requisite or a brake on progress. It is only through using AI that an organization can become mature in its trustworthy application.
For many, this will be about reducing risk as much as it is about seizing opportunity. Europe, the United Kingdom, many U.S. states, and nations the world over find themselves in various stages of crafting laws to protect their citizens and their economies from AI’s misuse, both hostile and benign.
And even where rules for AI are not legislated directly, for example nationally in the United States under the current administration, organizations must contend with AI’s second-order regulations. Though a government may decline to regulate AI directly, the organizations within its jurisdiction must still contend with laws in their sector separate and apart from AI. In other words, one is not absolved of their violation of privacy regulations, doctor-patient or lawyer-client privilege, or financial crime (to name a few) just because “the AI did it”, even when the AI itself was not regulated.
Those who withhold their best effort from the pursuit of Trustworthy AI do so at their own, grave peril. Given the degree to which almost nobody yet realizes how powerful these technologies are today—to say nothing of what they will soon achieve—it is a neglect so severe as to warrant the firing of leadership today, and the likely end of the organization itself in a few short years.
Trustworthy AI is not the sole domain of those organizations that prize competitive advantage, risk mitigation, or civic responsibility. It is, rather, the universal domain of those organizations that wish to survive.
Nearly everyone whose notion of AI is a clever chatbot or a variably reliable bit of office productivity tech fundamentally misunderstands what’s happening. The AI of their daily use prevents most of us from seeing the forest from the trees.
For AI’s absolutely transformative power is in its ability to pour through, assess, and act on data at a mind numbing scale that was previously far, far out of humankind’s grasp. This is not the AI of tomorrow; it is the AI of yesterday.
In many cases, this AI will be a giant leap for mankind, in our ability to cure disease, engineer new marvels, spot risks to the safety of populations before they materialize, and stimulate as yet unimagined prosperity in sectors that don’t yet exist.
In many other cases, this AI will be devastating in its ability to displace communities and individuals left behind, empower lone individuals to synthesize deadly pathogens, and to enable repressive regimes and geopolitical enemies to spy on one another—and on their own people—at a previously unimagined scale.
In any case, it is only in building trust brick by brick that we will prevail.
But a framework alone is insufficient to the task before us. So, in the coming weeks I will be so proud to share the launch of initiatives, tools, and global forums that will enable the world’s leading organizations to adopt and scale Trustworthy AI.
We begin here. Until then, I will leave you with a final line of Kennedy’s warning and cause for hope those six decades ago.
"There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again."
