‘I do not think ethical surveillance can exist’: Rumman Chowdhury on accountability in AI

Moral outsourcing, she says, applies the logic of sentience and choice to AI, allowing technologists to effectively reallocate responsibility for the products they build onto the products themselves – technical advancement becomes predestined growth, and bias becomes intractable.

“You would never say ‘my racist toaster’ or ‘my sexist laptop’,” she said in a Ted Talk from 2018. “And yet we use these modifiers in our language about artificial intelligence. And in doing so we’re not taking responsibility for the products that we build.” Writing ourselves out of the equation produces systematic ambivalence on par with what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil” – the wilful and cooperative ignorance that enabled the Holocaust. “It wasn’t just about electing someone into power that had the intent of killing so many people,” she says. “But it’s that entire nations of people also took jobs and positions and did these horrible things.”

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