The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) affects our lives in a number of ways. Facebook and Google use AI to curate the content that we consume through our newsfeed and our search results, and increasingly AI is used in areas that affect questions of life and death such as automated policing, autonomous weapons and distributing welfare benefits.
3AI, the Triple Partnership for Responsible AI, brings together research institutions in Norway, the U.S. and Brazil to investigate how AI can be made fair, accountable and transparent. To this end, we will exchange best practices, legislative, managerial and educational resources to address the following questions:
1. How can researchers, students and community organizers across the world work together to advance our understanding of the impact of AI across different groups of people, countries and settings?
2. How can academic knowledge empower decision makers in the private and public sector to ensure AI advances the social good?
Through joint courses, workshops and conferences, the project will connect Norwegian, American and Brazilian scholars, industry representatives, and policy makers. The aim is to draw on globally diverse viewpoints, and practical experience to address the societal impacts of AI. We will in particular focus on solutions to better understand the ethical implications of AI, and work towards sustainable implementations of it.
The three partner institutions are the Nordic Centre for Internet and Society at BI Norwegian Business School (NCIS), the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard (BKC) and the Institute for Technology and Society in Rio de Janeiro (ITS).
The development and implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within all domains of business, society, and governance has accelerated in recent years. Although current debate chiefly focuses on the economic consequences of AI, there is a growing awareness of the broader societal impacts of AI, especially of the actual and potential impact which AI has on underrepresented and marginalized communities. AI technologies are currently being developed, deployed, and adopted without sufficient consideration of the unequal ways in which their benefits and harms may be distributed across populations, geographies, and contexts.
The proposed Triple Partnership for Socially Responsible AI (3AI) will engage three academic institutions and their wider research networks to address this pressing issue: The Nordic Centre for Internet and Society at BI Norwegian Business School BI (NCIS), The Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University (BKC), and The Institute for Technology & Society in Rio de Janeiro (ITS). As a joint effort able to leverage globally diverse viewpoints, topical knowledge, and practical experience, this Triple Partnership will strengthen pre-existent project-based collaboration and enable the mutual exchange of students, young researchers, and practitioners across all three institutions.
Through facilitating international student exchanges, specialist academic courses, policy workshops, and multi-stakeholder conferences, the 3AI project will result in (a) the development of a shared understanding and more harmonized series of research efforts that rigorously assess the different impacts that AI technologies have across different populations, geographies, and contexts; and (b) the transfer of applied insights across academia, change agents from the public and private sectors, as well as the next generation of leaders to ensure that AI technologies advance the social good rather than perpetuate or exacerbate social inequalities.
