Technology companies are running a campaign to bend research and regulation for their benefit; society must fight back, says Yochai Benkler. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01413-1 Industry has mobilized to shape the science, morality and laws of artificial intelligence. On 10 May, letters of intent are due to the US National Science Foundation (NSF) for a new funding programme for projects on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence, in collaboration with Amazon. In April, after the European Commission released the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, an academic member of the expert group that produced them described their creation as industry-dominated “ethics washing”. In March, Google formed an AI ethics board, which was dissolved a week later amid controversy. In January, Facebook invested US$7.5 million in a centre on ethics and AI at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. [...] Inside an algorithmic black box, societal biases are rendered invisible and unaccountable. When designed for profit-making alone, algorithms necessarily diverge from the public interest — information asymmetries, bargaining power and externalities pervade these markets. For example, Facebook and YouTube profit from people staying on their sites and by offering advertisers technology to deliver precisely targeted messages. That could turn out to be illegal or dangerous. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development has charged Facebook with enabling discrimination in housing adverts (correlates of race and religion could be used to affect who sees a listing). YouTube’s recommendation algorithm has been implicated in stoking anti-vaccine conspiracies. I see these sorts of service as the emissions of high-tech industry: they bring profits, but the costs are borne by society. (The companies have stated that they work to ensure their products are socially responsible.) [...] When the NSF lends Amazon the legitimacy of its process for a $7.6-million programme (0.03% of Amazon’s 2018 research and development spending), it undermines the role of public research as a counterweight to industry-funded research. A university abdicates its central role when it accepts funding from a firm to study the moral, political and legal implications of practices that are core to the business model of that firm. So too do governments that delegate policy frameworks to industry-dominated panels. [...] Governments should use that leverage to demand that companies share data in properly-protected databases with access granted to appropriately insulated, publicly-funded researchers. Industry participation in policy panels should be strictly limited. Industry has the data and expertise necessary to design fairness into AI systems. It cannot be excluded from the processes by which we investigate which worries are real and which safeguards work, but it must not be allowed to direct them. Organizations working to ensure that AI is fair and beneficial must be publicly funded, subject to peer review and transparent to civil society. And society must demand increased public investment in independent research rather than hoping that industry funding will fill the gap without corrupting the process. _____ Non credo che si possa limitare l'influenza dell'industria senza escluderla completamente dal processo decisionale. Se partecipa, non può che imporre la propria forza economica e culturale per assicurarsi la massimizzazione dei profitti. Di conseguenza, le Università e gli enti di ricerca che ricevono fondi da privati andrebbero esclusi dal processo. Un'idea interessante potrebbe ispirarsi alla legge 266 del 1991: stabilire per legge che una certa quota dei proventi delle società che si occupano di Informatica vada devoluta a un ente completamente indipendente dalle aziende stesse che li usa per finanziare la ricerca delle Università e degli enti di ricerca non compromessi. Lo stesso, in realtà, si potrebbe fare con la medicina e in generale laddove la ricerca abbia rilevanza economica. Giacomo