AI & Ethics

The ethics of AI will be a key challenge over this next decade. AI's success has been on solving intellectual challenges (e.g. chess, Go) but the real challenge is arriving when AI needs to take on ethical decisions. This is hard enough for humans to do but how we expect AI to do this will be a defining moment for the role of AI in our society and especially in health care where it will be a matter of life and death. The same will be true in autonomous vehicles and how they approach these difficult decisions.
The data that AI uses for these ethical decisions will have come from our society & research and to ensure that there are no unintended biases in this is a challenge to be solved. Plus how we show that there is no unintended consequences in a AI driven healthcare decision.
In the Pistoia Alliance we believe that the life science industry needs to come together to solve these challenges to make sure we can develop the solutions and make them understandable to regulators and patients themselves

Links and background


  1. Ethics Challenge with David Reid, Liverpool Hope University on BBC Fourthought https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b09yfnw8 2018
  2. David Reid https://www.hope.ac.uk/staffindex/staffindeximport/associate-professor-david-reid.html
  3. Moral Machine http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ - Test your morals game
  4. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/artificial-intelligence-and-society-ethics/