Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Plays a Role in Engineering

The ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) has become an important topic in the application of AI and machine learning in the past several years. This second part of a two-part series presents the relevance and use of the ethics of AI in engineering applications. Part 1 explains the evolution and importance of AI ethics.

We know that predictive models developed by artificial-intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) algorithms are based on data. And, because we know how this data is used to build AI-based models, the main target of AI ethics is addressing how AI models become biased based on the quality and the quantity of the data that is used.

This second part of this two-part series discusses how AI ethics can determine and clarify how human biases of traditional engineers—assumptions, interpretations, simplifications, and preconceived notions—can be revealed in the engineering applications of AI and ML. Part 1 discussed the nonengineering applications of AI and ML and how human biases such as racism and sexism can be included in AI models through the inclusion of biased data during the training of the algorithms.