Have you ever experienced that your printer got stuck at a piece of paper? What if that happened every time you print? This course explains the importance of technical norms to which engineers abide to, so your printer works smoothly. Imagine that there were no standards. That is not easy, even if you try. The reason is that a lot of standards are very common to us and are with us for ages. But there are also new standards, new technical agreements, that are created rapidly every day. Did you ever ask yourself how under the hood of your mobile phone, messages are sent to other phones? Society would not be like it is today, if there were no technical agreements and or protocols on how things are working. This course explains how these technical specifications come into being and thus help you and but also society at large.
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Standardisation & Technology
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Meet the Instructors
Jan SmitsFull Professor, LL.M.
Innovation Engineering and Information Systems
Welcome to this lecture.
It will be the last of this course,
on the futures role and use of standards
in act and we will take as a subject Artificial Intelligence.
So, in this lecture you will learn a bit more about
the future and Artificial Intelligence and standardization.
First, when we try to define what machine learning,
Artificial Intelligence and things like that are.
The core of it is that it is at least simulating our human behavior,
our human thought, our human intelligence, and it's imitating.
So, it's never going to be us,
but it's trying to imitate us,
that means that there will be a lot of algorithms,
big data needed to do these things.
Then Cathy O'Neil which she wrote
a beautiful book with the title of Weapons of Mass Destruction,
is that we need to realize that algorithms are
computer program computer processes that contain
the prejudice of the people that make those algorithms.
So, they are not objectively they are just taking in what
the engineers or the software designers are really trying to grab.
Usually because they want to imitate or simulate human behavior.
Okay we have seen these development goals,
the Sustainable Development Goals at the UN wants to realize by 2030,
and when we look at it,
how they are going to do that,
and AI will play a huge role here, for instance,
when looking into medical applications,
when looking into educational purposes,
when looking into how smart citizen things will come into being.
So, for the United Nations and the standardization,
and the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques and
programs in each of these development goals are going to play a huge role.
We need to really start thinking about that,
that's exactly what the UN is doing of course also.
This last June in 2017 there was
this special conference which was
organized by one of the UN specialized agency namely the ITU
the International Telecommunications Union.. What really struck me is
that they use the word good in the announcement of the conference,
they want to apply AI for good,
so not to do not evil,
but make good things from it and that is going to be quite difficult.
So these different way of approaching they say ITU,
which is responsible of course for regulating the telecommunications,
world and environment, how to communicate through wireless and wireline,
communications and most sensors.
Most AI stuff which is going to be built into sensors,
are going to use telecommunication networks or ideal positions itself to
be an important organization to make AI transparent,
to know how all kinds of different standards will take in the artificial intelligence,
and so they are going to position themselves and making new standards.
But again, we are looking at the future,
we don't know exactly how they are operating it,
because they want to find out by having
a discussion with anybody who wants to take part in this.
Then IEEE, they also as I said earlier,
one of the reasons they want to become involved
is that a lot of ethical legal questions are underlying standards,
because it's embodied in a lot of technological applications,
it's embodied in a lot of sensors and things we are having around in the world.
So we really need to be assured almost what's in it?
What type of computer programming?
What type of software is being used to make the devices work.
So they have in searching for underlying principles to be
ethically involved that the people that are making standards they know,
what the ethical questions are that need to be tackled,
that need to be answered.
Almost a year ago,
they published one of their first let's say hands-on things,
elements that need to be considered when building standards, when making,
and applying Artificial Intelligence inside
of the computer programs and the automatic systems we are using.
Please go to the website and start reading these type of reports because,
then you will know these are real difficult questions, and engineering,
and lawyers, and lawmakers,
and standardization makers, need to really consider these type of questions.
They even, and they in this case is IEEE,
they even made a special group that the P7002,
they will be addressing all these type of ethical questions that need to be addressed,
and that need to be answered in all kinds of
different environments all over the normal work fields of IEEE.
Then what is interesting to note,
is that one of the national standardization institutes,
the British standardization Institute namely,
already published the first Standard on how robots and robotic devices need to operate,
and what ethical underlying principles should be used in
designing and applying robots in certain environments.
So, if you would like to consider this you can go into
it and see what they have made and given us
as afterthoughts on what type of information needs to be embedded in
standards on automated driving environments for instance.
Then let's say in concluding this course,
and also in concluding this the future use and role of standards I
went back to Asimov's flaws on what a robot should do,
and what a robot shouldn't do.
It's interesting that in 1950 for instance,
Alan Turing said that,
"When there is a human and a computer,
and they are both answering my questions as an observer,
and a human doesn't know that the computers answering,
at that moment and AI will really be one of the important,
then AI will be like a human being,
that remains to be seen."
Interesting Asimov. On the other hand,
only recently that played a role in the IEEE digital ethics environment,
there have been devised a number of ethical rules that should be
taken into account when making new systems,
when making robots, when making cars that can behave and drive by themselves,
and for instance here you can see that these group of people
consider a robot to be a product not a human being,
but read for yourself what these five ethical rules are,
what they are using as basic principles.
The last approach towards what could be let's
say the safeguarding of our human values could be the UN declaration on human rights,
that we are trying to use all over the world as
a basic principle for behaving nicely towards each other,
and humanly the question I would like to leave this course with,
and like to leave it with you also to start thinking about,
what should we use?
As underlying principles for making computers working for us,
making computer software programs working for us,
how transparent should these be?
What should be the underlying principles?
Should that be the UN Declaration?
Should it be Asimov's laws?
Should it be the ethical rules as devised by the IEEE Working Group?
It's up to you, start taking a role there.
Well, this really brings us to a number of the last slides on this course,
as well as this last lecture.
This was on the future use and role standards in Artificial Intelligence.
Over the whole course we have tried to tell you what the position of the standards is,
how they come into being,
how they have been used in history,
what can we learn from it now,
and in what way will they play a role in the future.
So, thank you for watching.
Let's conclude with, thank you very much for watching,
there will be a bibliography to give you the possibilities to search a bit more,
on standards and standards development,
and I also hope that this course gave you enough thoughts and new ways of
exploring to see that from now on standardization will be higher on your personal agenda,
and that it will bring more insights into how technology works in our society.
Thank you very much for watching
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