AI ethics

I started thinking about AI ethics while at Microsoft. It began with a question: if intelligent services can predict your needs, how does the service respect your wishes? This was at the height of the 'digital assistant' hype created by Siri, Cortana and Alexa. I wrote two papers: Attention Management (which I share), and AI Etiquette, which I'm not able to share. These papers introduced me to the Microsoft Research team and a deep dive into some of the ethical quandaries they were grappling with. I went on to work with Kaiser Permanente, where I was faced with the ethical tradeoffs of nudging beneficial behavior. The Kaiser work led to my startup Formation driving a 500% increase in purchase behavior at Starbucks using personalized AI-powered gamified nudging. I began speaking about the dual nature of AI and the ease with which it can be abused. I spoke to a room of 1,000 designers at the 2019 IxDA conference about the role designers play in deploying deceptive AI tools. I continue to speak out against unethical behavior from frontier AI companies, and worked with the Center for Humane Technology to raise awareness about the dangers of persuasive AI. Part of my job at Bumble is defining responsible use guidelines for the deployment of AI in social and dating products.