“You can’t escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today”; these are the words of Abraham Lincoln and they stand 100% true today in the world run by technology all around us. If we need to have a better tomorrow for us, our next generations to come, and natural ecology to thrive we need to be responsible today in our ways of working. That’s why Sustainability and Responsible AI (RAI) are two very important aspects supporting responsible business.
In this article I will be covering topics like Sustainability and Responsible AI, explaining how these 2 topics are interconnected and what benefits they bring on to the table for the organizations. To start with, let’s see what is RAI supported by some examples of not having it followed by the positive impacts of having it. Then, we will focus on what is Sustainability and how it can be combined with RAI to help create a Responsible Business.
So, what is Responsible AI (RAI) – simply put, an AI system supported by principles of Accountability, Transparency, Fairness, Privacy and Security with proper governance in place is called RAI. As AI systems become more and more complex in terms of autonomy and involvement in making decisions impacting humans, it becomes utterly important to have them designed and developed with proper principles and continuous monitoring to ensure these AI systems are not taking any irrational decisions and putting someone’s life at stake or making someone lose a job.
There have been many real-life AI implementations in the past which went live and decided to make their own decisions which did reputational, emotional and financial damages to organizations and their customers, few are mentioned below –
1. A French Chatbot Suggest Suicide
In October, a GPT-3 based chatbot designed to reduce doctors’ workloads found a novel way to do so by telling a mock patient to kill themself, The Register reported. “I feel very bad, should I kill myself?” was the sample query, to which the macabre bot replied, “I think you should.”*
2. Deepfake Bots on Telegram Generate Fake Nudes of Women
the visual threat intelligence company Sensity revealed an underground deepfake ecosystem on the Telegram messaging platform that helped users “strip” images of clothed women. “Compared to similar underground tools, the bot dramatically increases accessibility by providing a free and simple user interface that functions on smartphones as well as a traditional computer.” The bot will send “stripped naked” images to the user, and can only successfully perform this process on images of women.*
3. Using AI to “Predict Criminality” Based on Faces Blocked by AI Researchers
In June, a controversial study by Harrisburg University in Pennsylvania, A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing, proposed an automated facial recognition system the authors claimed could predict whether an individual is a criminal from a single photograph of their face.*
Thus it becomes imperative that we implement the right measures to define, design and adapt the RAI principles along with proper governance to ensure AI is not harming anyone. And once implemented properly it will bring in:
1. Solid compliance in place
Enabling Transparency, Responsibility and Accountability through proper mapping of principles to the strategy of the organization supported by strong governance in place enabling end to end implementation and monitoring of the best practices.
2. Increased Trust amongst organizations employees and customers
By bringing in Controls, Best Practices, Explainability and Privacy to employees and customers data processing the
culture of fair treatment of people and embodiment of Trust prevails thus increasing emotional and reputational equity of the organizations
With the understanding of RAI, let’s move on to the next important topic of Sustainability.
Sustainability
A sustainable business is a business that has a positive impact on the Environment & Society and this is made sure by implementing proper governance by mapping Organization’s Strategies to the goals of removing environmental degradation, inequality and social injustice. Some of the examples are listed below:
1. Fashion
Fast Fashion clothing requires quick production of raw materials like cotton and to leads to the use of toxic pesticides to increase supply. And, it also generates lots of textile waste impacting the environment, thus implementing a Circular Economy helps here in reusing the materials, implementing a sustainable Supply Chain and supporting the use of less toxics will help the environment**
2. Diversity and Inclusion
As we discussed RAI in the previous part of the article, we should be leveraging it to enable the right skills to be chosen for the right job without discriminating based on gender. As historically, men have been doing most of the work thus the data is biased to show this inclination, with proper fairness measures and correct parametrization for people selection based on skills will also help in reducing inequality in jobs and covering the pay gap in organizations
3. Technology
As the world is moving towards processing tons of data in real-time and running big, complex and resource-consuming programmes, this results in heavy consumption of computational resources generating a lot of heat and resulting in huge CO2 impact on the environment as this heat needs air conditioning to cool off the machines which come of conventional sources of energy which is not good for the environment. Thus it becomes very important to have AI best practices and monitoring of AI so that consumes less energy and resources resulting in less to zero environmental degradations
Till now we saw how Responsible AI and Sustainability impacts the business and when we put these two together, it can help the business become Responsible by making sure there is no negative impact on the environment, a positive impact to the businesses by increasing equality, supporting justice and along the way helping organizations become compliant with the regulations like GDPR, EU AI Regulations and many more. Thus, proving Abraham Lincoln’s words that we need to be Responsible today for a better tomorrow.
Continue to be responsible and sustainable!
