I was alone on AI ethics for a long time

What do/did you believe to be true that may have got you in trouble that is now obviously true?

For me, I was alone in my concern for ethical products and algorithms.

In 2010, I left a great role to spend day, night, weekends and every dollar to my name (and more) to build a product whose mission was to fairly make it easy to have thoughtful conversations.

Many of you met during that phase of my career.

I wrote about it a bit. First on my own platform, next on TheNextWeb, thanks to Martin SFP Bryant and later on TechCrunch, thanks to Jonathan Shieber.

The pitch excerpt was shared at a time where it would’ve been the first time “bias in AI” was ever printed on TechCrunch. They’d publish two related guest posts before mine made it out and the NYT would announce an Ethics in AI group at CMU between this pitch and publication.

Years after I started to rant and rave about the problem.

There was no movement.

I was very alone and very crazy.

Fairness in tech has been battle.

I was alone in a lot of my beliefs for a long time. I pushed them to watch the world wake up.

Now, it’s obvious. Social can’t fairly give us all a platform. Algorithms have tremendous bias. Products are addictive and can be harmful to our mental health.