Thoughts on AI Index Report 2023 (Stanford-HAI) - Part 3

Quick Summary of what I am doing here. I am writing my thoughts on the AI Index Report that was published late March of 2023. If you want to access the report, it is below.

Part 1 and Part 2 are right here. :)

Let us jump right in as we discuss about Point 5 & Point 6 here.

5. The number of incidents concerning the misuse of AI is rapidly rising.

According to the AIAAIC database, which tracks incidents related to the ethical misuse of AI, the number of AI incidents and controversies has increased 26 times since 2012. Some notable incidents in 2022 included a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy surrendering and U.S. prisons using call-monitoring technology on their inmates. This growth is evidence of both greater use of AI technologies and awareness of misuse possibilities.

Well if you do not know about the AIAAIC database, here is the database website. A quick glance and my impression is that it is quite comprehensive with use cases from various countries and some of these use cases are not even published in the newspapers.

If you have been following my previous posts, I have been advocating for such a database that can record the possible misuse and abuse of Artificial Intelligence technology. Many thanks to the Report, I manage to find one and will definitely have a good time running through these cases to understand more about current development in Artificial Intelligence.

Have a knowledge base helps in moving us, since it is a very new technology that is still in development, from "unknown unknown" risks to the "known unknown" risks. This movement will provide the many perspectives that we need to build more robust and positively impactful AI. Tying this with another insight in the Report, the database can serve to increase the interest and awareness of AI abuses.

Interest in AI ethics continues to skyrocket.

The number of accepted submissions to FAccT, a leading AI ethics conference, has more than doubled since 2021 and increased by a factor of 10 since 2018. 2022 also saw more submissions than ever from industry actors.

Coming back to the insights made by the Report. When I read this report, I personally think it is a great news to see that increase. But I sincerely hope accidents that costs human lives can decrease to the zero where possible but again if you put it in context, everyday there are lives lost due to various human accidents.

The increase in incidents is expected as long as we want to develop Artificial Intelligence as a useful technology. It needs to be experimented. The biggest issue right now I felt is pretty urgent and important is understanding how the different hyperparameters of deep learning models impact the accuracy of the model. Right now we are stabbing in the dark when we try to improve the deep learning models. This is not ideal because we have no direction on how to improve these models then. Still remember that neural network models are subjected to adversarial attacks? :)

Going into the future, I hope together with my readers, please share and raise awareness on similar databases that records successful and failed use cases of Artificial Intelligence. We need to raise that awareness and incorporate the lessons into our experiments and products so as to reduce the risk of abuse and increase the positive impact of AI as a tool.

6. The demand for AI-related professional skills is increasing across virtually every American industrial sector.

Across every sector in the United States for which there is data (with the exception of agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting), the number of AI-related job postings has increased on average from 1.7% in 2021 to 1.9% in 2022. Employers in the United States are increasingly looking for workers with AI-related skills.

My apologies on repeating this but yes again, it is foreseeable. If you still remember my commentary post on the big technology companies retrenchment. I did mention the tech layoffs will now allow non-tech industry to have access to tech talents. This will give them a chance to start incorporating the latest technology into the business, allowing them to start moving up the learning curve, the Industry 4.0 learning curve.

If a country's government is very serious about adopting and having AI as a significant part of the economy and defense strategy, they should start looking at the education and training system.

For the education system, start exposing more students to Artificial Intelligence technology. Give them some fun hands-on and expose them to the mathematics involved. What we want to get from the education system are prodigies and/or the passionate. These prodigies and/or passionate can serve as the manpower of the future to power the AI Industry.

The training industry is to cater to current manpower of the country. The training industry is focused on lifelong learning, moving cutting-edge research to business applications by updating the manpower constantly. There should be a learning pathway that allows for mid-career changers too. Their past experience and domain knowledge will be great resources for non-tech industry to seek and adopt the latest AI technology.  

Conclusion

Both these points are foreseeable, being part of the industry for almost two decades (since 2004). As we go along in this journey of developing better Artificial Intelligence, the number of incidents will keep increasing. As industry practitioners, we need to focus on getting the lessons and implementing what we have learned from these incidents into our work, so as to design better Artificial Intelligence tools. In fact, the databases should be shared to all training and education institutions, dictating that they should use it for the lessons and training.

These days, if I want to know whether a country is really serious about putting a large footprint in the AI industry, I will look at their education system, talent development programs and their proposed policies & governance. I found them to be extremely useful in predicting their trajectories.

What are your thoughts?

If you want to read my thoughts on the 2022 report, here they are.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

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