Unless you’ve been under a rock, you know there is a massive explosion of interest and activity around artificial intelligence, including both the deep learning techniques that took off in the 2010s, and the generative systems like ChatGPT that are booming now. Maybe you’re involved in building, deploying, or studying AI. Maybe you’re a business leader wondering how it will impact your firm or industry. Maybe you’re involved in the public policy world, inside or outside government, trying to figure out the tough regulatory questions that AI raises. Or maybe you’re just an ordinary person thinking about the ways AI might change your life, your community, and society more broadly.
Along with the immense potential of AI to do good, both in business and social terms, comes the reality of many limitations and dangers of this technology. Those include harmful errors, bias, privacy abuses, manipulation, copyright violations, misinformation, security vulnerabilities, and more. For AI to reach its potential, we must engage these issues. We need Accountable AI.
Thankfully, there are growing communities of experts in academia, the technical community, the business world, non-governmental organizations, and government tackling these challenges. But much remains to be done. This Substack aims to be a preeminent high-quality resource for understanding the potential and reality of Accountable AI.
About Me
Since 2004, I have been a professor at Wharton, the business school of the University of Pennsylvania. I’ve published extensively on various aspects of technology policy, founded the Wharton Blockchain and Digital Asset Project, created the Coursera MOOC on Gamification taken by hundreds of thousands of learners, and written several books, including The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust. I’ve also served on the Obama Administration’s Presidential Transition Team, worked as an advisor to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Department of Commerce, created the Supernova executive technology conference, and earlier in my career, edited the seminal technology newsletter Release 1.0 and served as Counsel for New Technology Policy at the FCC in the Clinton Administration. I’ve been teaching a course at Wharton on what I now call Accountable AI since 2016.
Why Accountable AI?
I explain in this post what I mean by Accountable AI, and how it’s a helpful framing for responses to the legal and ethical challenges that AI poses.
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