TLDR: Pace University, in collaboration with the Business Council of Westchester (BCW), recently convened a panel of experts to discuss the evolving ethical landscape and regulatory challenges surrounding artificial intelligence. The discussion, part of the BCW’s AI Alliance 360 series, highlighted the need for responsible AI development, addressing issues such as data bias, privacy, and differing regulatory approaches between the U.S. and Europe.
Pace University recently served as the venue for a critical discussion on the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence, hosted by the Business Council of Westchester (BCW). The panel, titled ‘Governing the Future: The Ethical Frontier of AI Regulations and Policy,’ brought together a diverse group of legal and educational experts from both the private and public sectors to tackle the complexities of AI’s rapid advancement.
Marsha Gordon, President and CEO of the BCW, moderated the event, emphasizing its timeliness. “It’s an incredibly timely conversation that’s reshaping policy, practice and innovation across industries,” Gordon stated. She initiated the discussion with a ‘coffee chat’ featuring Chrystal P. Mauro, Senior Counsel at IBM Consulting.
Mauro elaborated on IBM’s commitment to ethical AI, outlining its ‘five pillars of trust’: fairness, robustness, explainability, privacy, and transparency. She particularly stressed the importance of fairness, asking, “Fairness is what are you using for your models? What are you training your models on? Is that data filled with biases and what kind of outcomes are you getting?” This highlights the critical need to scrutinize the foundational data used in AI systems to prevent perpetuating existing societal biases.
Dr. James Brusseau, a Philosophy Professor at Pace University, drew a clear distinction between the regulatory philosophies prevalent in the United States and Europe. He characterized the U.S. approach as ‘acceleration ethics,’ where “we roll out innovation, and then innovation creates benefits, but also creates risks or problems like privacy risks. Then we try to use a next step of innovation to solve that problem.” In contrast, he described Europe’s ‘precautionary ethics’ as a “more centralized system, and what they want to do is foresee possible ethical risks.”
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The panel also included insights from Amy B. Goldsmith, Chair of Cybersecurity, Data Management and Privacy practice at Tarter Krinsky & Drogin, and Elaine C. Zacharakis, a Health, Privacy, and Technology Consultant/Attorney. Zacharakis, also an Associate Professor and HIPAA Compliance Officer at the New York Institute of Technology, and an Adjunct Professor at Pace Law School, discussed AI’s significant role in healthcare. She acknowledged the “tremendous” benefits of AI in areas like analyzing big data for cancer therapies, while simultaneously cautioning about the “lot of risk to privacy” that accompanies such advancements.
