 Welcome back to the AI for Good Global Summit here in Geneva, we're here of course at the ITU headquarters. Now I'm now joined by a university professor in The Hague, Amy Van Winesburg, I hope I pronounced that correctly. What brings you here? Yes well I am here because I bring the ethics perspective so I was on stage talking about what ethics is and how it can be a powerful driver for innovation and the reason why I chose that as the theme or the topic of my discussion is because oftentimes companies and academics are like they see ethics as a hindrance you know it slows innovation down it's stifling innovation and what I was trying to do in my talk was to change the rhetoric surrounding ethics so that it can actually open up new challenges that engineers and programmers can can decide to focus on it you know steers you in a very different direction you know dedicated to the sustainable development goals and ethical and societal issues and values. You keep mentioning ethics What are the ethical concerns? These are robots we're in control. Yeah yeah well that's the goal is that we will remain in control right but you know we already see so much of the data that's collected it forms a kind of digital double or you have an online profile and there's real world decisions that are made based on the online profile of all of this data that's collected about you so we don't always have control right now there's there's many instances right now where we don't have control and that's just talking about big data then when we talk about how we want to give AI the capability to make decisions online frequency high frequency trading right I'm using AI to assist judges in sentencing of criminals using AI for approval or disapproval of mortgages for getting into universities right AI is used to make all of these real world decisions and we are at risk of delegating too much to the AI so we have to make sure that this message is a common theme the humans must maintain have meaningful human control over the kinds of things that we delegate to AI apart from speaking to us here at the summit how do you get your message across and who to right so I have a role as an assistant professor at the university and I'm engaged in education right talking to students about these issues but it's it's not so much talking at or talking to it's trying to inspire their creativity trying to try to get them to come around to the idea oh really we're focusing on the innovation but we need to be considering the people who aren't at this table having the discussion so I have a role in education but also my role then as part of the not-for-profit organization the foundation for responsible robotics we talked to companies we talked to other NGOs we you know are at platforms like this so really it's about reaching as many stakeholders as we can the general public though is one of our main targets we write consultation documents our most recent one was on sex robots and our sexual future with robots and it was really about getting the public to understand that this technology is coming and we should think about what we want to do with it it's big business big business listen to you so I think yeah it depends on how we approach big business and there's there's multiple schools of thought when it comes to ethics there's some ethicists that would prefer to do they they call it armchair philosophy to not get in the mud to not understand what's going on in the technology and then it's really hard to have a dialogue with big business and those kinds of philosophers I'm very much an ethicist who wants to be a part of the design team who wants to understand the obstacles that the company is facing and to try and really make it a collaborative event so in that respect I would say that businesses are listening to me but we still need to go a step further it still needs to become a part of the company culture that you have an ethicist there to ask questions to you know in a similar way that there's a data protection or a data privacy officer in the company we should have an ethicist in the company that's there to sort of facilitate step-by-step development finally are you positive about the future the future in general a future of AI or the future of robotics the future of AI in our lives yeah yeah that's a good question I would say it's difficult to be overly optimistic because you know humans can do so many good things but can also do so many bad things and then at the same time it's difficult to be overly pessimistic again humans can do so many good things so I take almost a kind of a agnostic view I guess you could say and to say that I want to be a part of doing good that I acknowledge that there will be some misdoings that happen with AI and robotics but I want to be a part of the good and so in that respect I am optimistic that there are other people like me and there will be good things that happen very good a positive message there and positive feelings coming from professor Amy Van Weinberg based in The Hague thank you very much