As more and more business decisions get handed over (sometime blindly) to computer algorithms (aka ‘AI’), companies are very late to the game in considering what the consequences of that delegation will yield. As a buffer against these consequences, a company may want to be more transparent about how it’s algorithms work but that is not without it’s challenges.
To start, companies attempting to utilize artificial intelligence need to recognize that there are costs associated with transparency. This is not, of course, to suggest that transparency isn’t worth achieving, simply that it also poses downsides that need to be fully understood. These costs should be incorporated into a broader risk model that governs how to engage with explainable models and the extent to which
information about the model is available to others.
Second, organizations must also recognize that security is becoming an increasing concern in the world of AI. As AI is adopted more widely, more security vulnerabilities and bugs will surely be discovered, as my colleagues and I at the Future of Privacy Forum recently argued. Indeed, security may be one of the biggest long-term barriers to the adoption of AI.