MT student group explores the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence
AI Ethics Reading Group was founded by students who have seen firsthand that technology developed with the best of intentions can still be problematic.
“We’re building tools that have a lot of leverage. If you don’t build them properly, you can do a lot of harm. You need to be constantly thinking about ethics.”
— Sacha Ghebali, MBA candidate, Sloan School of Management
For years, the tech industry followed a move-fast-and-break-things approach, and few people seemed to mind as a wave of astonishing new tools for communicating and navigating the world appeared on the market.
Now, amid rising concerns about the spread of fake news, the misuse of personal data, and the potential for machine-learning algorithms to discriminate at scale, people are taking stock of what the industry broke. Into this moment of reckoning come three MIT students, Irene Chen, Leilani Gilpin, and Harini Suresh, who are the founders of the new MIT AI Ethics Reading Group.
All three are graduate students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) who had done stints in Silicon Valley, where they saw firsthand how technology developed with good intentions could go horribly wrong.
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