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Angie Basiouny: This podcast is
brought to you by Knowledge at Wharton. Welcome to Knowledge at Wharton.
I'm Angie Basiouny. I'm here
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today with Kevin Werbach. He is
Professor and Chair of the Department of Legal Studies and
Business Ethics at Wharton. He's
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also the Faculty Director of our
new Wharton Accountable AI Lab, which is dedicated to advancing
responsible development
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of artificial intelligence. And that
is what we're going to talk about today. Kevin, welcome
aboard.
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Kevin Werbach: Thanks so much. Appreciate having you here.
So let's just jump right into it.
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What is accountable AI? Why
did you start this lab? Accountable AI is about understanding the
challenges that AI poses. The
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starting point is that AI is an
incredible innovation. It has tremendous potential to create
value for businesses and to do a
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great deal of social good. But
we can't realize that potential, we can't achieve the benefits of
AI without acknowledging,
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understanding and mitigating the
risks. Thinking about the potential dangers and harms and
problems with AI. So accountable
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AI is about not just thinking
what could happen, what are the risks, although that's part of
it, not just asking from an
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abstract perspective, what
principles should organizations have about what they're doing
with AI? Again, that's part of
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it. Not just saying generally,
we should be responsible about AI or have well-governed AI,
although that's part of it. It's
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saying, systematically, how do
we put into place the kinds of practices and the understandings
that it takes to ensure that AI
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systems are deployed and
developed in the ways that maximize their benefits and
appropriately mitigate and
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address or redress the problems
and harms. And accountability is chosen by— is something I chose
intentionally. It's about making
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those connections, the
connection between the risks and the potential or real harms and
what actually happens. To
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prevent them, to mitigate them,
to understand them, to address them. Having all those practices
in place and doing it in a
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thoughtful, systematic,
structured, rigorous way, which, of course, is very consistent
with how we
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think about things
at Wharton. So let me ask you, is the
Lab going to— are you going to
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develop, sort of like a best
practices or prescriptive information for business—
business leaders, for tech
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companies, about how to use AI,
how to deploy it? One of the things that I have
found in speaking with companies
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in the research that I do in
this area, and as we were putting together the plans for
the Lab, is that most of them are
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really struggling to get on top
of these issues. They don't understand what other
organizations are doing. There's
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a few companies who are very far
advanced, especially some of the big technology companies have
invested significantly in
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responsible AI or AI governance.
But even they have questions about, what should they be
doing? What are other companies
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doing? Are they appropriately
addressing all of the issues? What does the data show about
what kinds of governance
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mechanisms are effective? And
most companies are not even at that point. So we are certainly
not going to say we'll tell
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companies what the best
practices are. AI is so diverse, and there's so many different
kinds of AI. There's— there's
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machine learning systems,
there's generative AI. It's a different thing if we're talking
about a company that is doing
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hardcore technical development
of AI models, versus a company that may be a very large
enterprise but is deploying a
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system that they are procuring
from elsewhere, versus a small startup that is involved in this
area. And it depends on what
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industry you're in and so forth.
So we are first going to try to understand what organizations
are actually doing, what's
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successful, what's not
successful, what are the gaps, to try and synthesize some of that
to help organizations understand
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what the possibilities are. And
it's a moving target. It's going to be an ongoing process of
understanding what can be done,
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what are all the problems that
are most concerning, and how can they be overcome?
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That is a tall task, but I know
that you're up for it. I want to tell people a little bit about
your about your background. You
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have a law degree from Harvard.
You came to Wharton in 2004, so going on 21 years now. But you
also worked in the Clinton
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Administration, the Obama
Administration. You worked with the FCC on emerging technology.
You've been at this for a long
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time. You have four books about
technology, including blockchain. You've seen the
emerging technology. You've
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worked on the business
implications, the ethical implications. Here's AI. Is it
different? How is it different
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from the concerns that we've
dealt with in the past? Or is it the same? Some of both. As you note, I
have been working on emerging
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technologies my whole career. When
I started in the 1990s, that was the internet. And I wrote a
paper on internet policy at the
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Federal Communications
Commission. This was early on, before I was an academic. And at
that point, there were something
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like less than 50 million people
on the internet in the entire world, and the vast majority of
them were people dialing up on
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their telephone to the
proprietary America Online service. There was not a single
person in all of China who had a
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private internet connection at
that point. And yet, we could see the issues that were coming
up. We could see that this has a
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technology that has the
potential to change the world, and we needed to understand what
the issues were. And so all
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throughout my career, I've tried
to get engaged on major, important technology
developments early enough to
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identify the issues to work on,
helping to develop the regulatory strategies, work with
government, identify and
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highlight what the problems are
before it was too late. And so I did that with broadband
technology. I did that with
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something called gamification,
which is applying psychological techniques and other techniques
from video games to motivate
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people in different contexts. I
did it, as you mentioned, with blockchain, which was another
field that because— that I saw coming,
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that had this diverse potential,
but it was still poorly understood. In fact, it's still
poorly understood today. AI, I
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put in a similar bucket. We are,
in some ways, very far along with AI. The AI, if you're
talking about in terms of
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machine learning technology, is
decades old. In some ways, though, we're just at the
beginning. We're just a couple
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years after the kind of ChatGPT
shot heard around the world announcement that kicked off
this incredible race to exploit
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the potential and understand the
potential of generative AI. And we know there are all these
problems. We know there are
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issues about privacy and bias
and intellectual property and manipulation and so on and so
forth, and yet we don't have
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good solutions. So AI is similar
to these earlier technologies in that it starts at a point where
it has tremendous potential and
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generates a lot of excitement,
but there's a lack of understanding broadly about,
really, whether we'll realize its
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potential and what the impacts
will be. But every technology is different. And with each of
these waves, we build on what
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came before. So AI leverages the
fact that we have the internet, and we have these incredible
networks and technical
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capabilities which allow things
to be deployed and scaled very fast around the world. And we
see this tremendous amount of
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activity and investment going
into this space. So it's different than it was back 30
years ago, when I was looking at
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dial up internet, but it's
similar in that we have this period of uncertainty, and I
think that is the point where
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it's most important to really
dig in. Think about the ethical issues, think about the
governance issues, think about
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the regulatory issues.
And so that's really the genesis of the
Accountable AI Lab.
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There are a number of issues. In
my experience interviewing people about AI, which I've been
doing quite a bit over the last
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year, I find that there are
three camps, right? So there are the people who fear it, the
people who celebrate it, can't
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wait for more of it. And then
those are— those are— there are folks who are just proceeding
with caution, right? Yellow
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light, green light, red light.
What camp do you fall into? Why? And, you know, what's your
overall message about AI,
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especially heading up this Lab? All three.
- All three. You can't fear it without
celebrating. Because if you fear
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it, it means that you believe AI
has this incredible potential, that it's going to be deployed
and going to have real impacts.
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And similarly, you can't
celebrate it without recognizing these challenges, a whole range
of challenges. And some of them
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are very speculative, but many
of them are very real. I've talked to lots of companies that say
our focus is not on regulation.
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Our focus is on whatever the
government tells us. We know we're going to deploy these
systems that might have
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problems. And if we build and
deploy something that breaks, it fails, the generative AI system
hallucinates and gives false
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information, that could be a big
problem for us with our customers in the marketplace. So—
and these are companies that are
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deploying. These are companies
that are excited about it, but they realize they need to
understand the problems. And
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then the reality is, there are
some aspects of this where speed is absolutely essential.
Companies need to invest things
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are developing so fast, there's
so much potential. You don't want to get left behind. But you
need to understand where there
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are points where care is
warranted, where there is the opportunity and the need to
slow down and ask and answer
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these questions. And even if the
technology is moving really fast, there's going to be
regulation. There are going to
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be laws passed. There are going to
be court cases addressing these issues. And so you can't just
ignore all of that. You have to
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appreciate that development of
the legal process and the development of, frankly, the
kinds of deeper understandings
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that come out of research in
lots of different fields, not just in law. In terms of, what are
the technical capabilities? What
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can we do to mitigate bias? What
is the potential for explanation of generative AI systems? It's a
fascinating area of advanced
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research. And what is the
development of ethical and psychological behavioral
understandings of what's going
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on here? That is happening over
time. Not at the same speed as the technical development of AI,
but it's going to have a really
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big impact, all those things, on
being able to realize the full potential of the technology.
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I know that you and so many of
your colleagues at Wharton, and beyond Wharton— everybody's
working on these issues. So I'm
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really excited to see what's
going to come out of the Lab. Before we go, I do want to let
folks know about your podcast.
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It's called <i>The Road to
Accountable AI</i>. I've listened
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to a couple of episodes. You got
some really interesting guests on there. Can you just tell us a
little bit about it?
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Yeah, the podcast is an
interview show. I spend 30 to 40 minutes on each episode talking
with a guest, and it's a range.
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I speak with senior government
officials from multiple countries. I speak with
technologists, I speak with
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academics, I speak with business
executives who are leading the responsible AI groups or AI
governance groups at some of the
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largest companies. And I speak
with startups that are building tools to address some of these
problems. And so it's really
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intended as an educational
journey on how this broad area of accountable AI is developing,
and trying to help people
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understand what the state of the
art is and also what the questions are that they should
be thinking about.
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It definitely goes deep. I
appreciate it. Thanks for being here.
- Absolutely, really a pleasure to do it, and
thanks so much for the interest.
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Kevin Werbach, everyone,
Professor and Chair of the Department of Legal Studies and
Business Ethics here at Wharton.
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He's also the Faculty Director
of our new Wharton Accountable AI Lab. If you'd like to learn
more about that initiative, type
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in Wharton Accountable AI Lab in
your browser. I also invite you to check out his podcast, <i>Road
to Accountable AI</i>. For <i>Knowledge</i>
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<i>at Wharton</i>, I'm Angie Basiouny.
Thanks for joining us. For more insight from <i>Knowledge
at Wharton</i>, please visit
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knowledge.Wharton.upenn.edu.