97 Things About Ethics Everyone in Data Science Should Know

Chapter 50. Triage and Artificial Intelligence

Peter Bruce

Founder, Institute for Statistics Education at Statistics.com, an Elder Research company

Predictim is a service that scans potential babysitters’ social media and other online activity and issues them a score that parents can use in selecting a babysitter. Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, commented that there is a “mad rush to seize the power of AI to make all kinds of decisions without ensuring it’s accountable to human beings. It’s like people have drunk the digital Kool-Aid and think this is an appropriate way to govern our lives.”¹

Does/should AI make decisions? In transformative technologies like self-driving cars, the answer is unavoidably “yes.” If a human must remain behind the wheel to make or ratify driving decisions, the goal of self-driving technology is largely unattained. But the attention that Predictim attracted has resulted in the loss of its automated access (scraping privileges) to the Facebook platform as a source of data.

The Triage Nurse

In many bread-and-butter applications of statistical and machine learning, the proper role of predictive AI is not that of the robot doctor rendering diagnoses and according treatments but rather that of the triage nurse.

In the 1790s, a French military surgeon established a systematic categorization of military casualties ...