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Your go-to source for latest insights from our lawyers. Through sharp analysis and commentary, we explore the pressures facing businesses today.

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Algorithms, ethics and law

This is a thoughtful piece that explores some of the fundamental ethical and legal issues surrounding the use of algorithms and the data they feed on. 

Those issues simply haven't arisen in the same way with established technologies, so the past doesn't offer a useful precedent. As the article points out, the provenance, ownership, accuracy and fairness of the data used to train AI systems are of as much concern as the algorithms themselves. By addressing the ethical issues now, users could minimise legal problems later on.

As artificial intelligence (AI) penetrates deeper into business operations and services, even supporting judicial decision-making, are we approaching a time when the greatest legal mind could be a machine? According to Prof Dame Wendy Hall, co-author of the report Growing the Artificial Intelligence Industry in the UK, we are just at the beginning of the AI journey and now is the time to set boundaries. “All tech has the power to do harm as well as good,” Hall says. “So we have to look at regulating companies and deciding what they can and cannot do with the data now.”

Tags

ai, ethics, algorithms, machine learning