Page 149 - ITU Journal - ICT Discoveries - Volume 1, No. 2, December 2018 - Second special issue on Data for Good

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But empathy tends to appeal to people’s emotions, [2]
which can be manipulated and exploited. Paul
Bloom, in his book ”Against empathy: the case for
rational compassion” argued that “[i]t is because of
empathy that citizens of a country can be transfixed [3]
by a girl stuck in a well and largely indifferent to
climate change”, adding, provocatively: “We should
aspire to a world in which a politician appealing to
someone’s empathy would be seen in the same way as
one appealing to people’s racist bias” [20]. And so
perhaps a key ingredient of a human AI is “rational
compassion”, which may be defined as the ability to
consider different perspectives on the basis of facts,
which we feel does not rule out reasonable
interpersonal empathy.
[5]
A human AI also requires developing incentives and
means for civil society organizations, researchers,
regulators, and others, to demand that public
policies and programs be evaluated systematically [6]
using the best available data and methodologies, to
adjust future iterations and contribute to a body of
evidence on what yields which results. Data for
transparency and rational compassion are a recipe
for dealing with fake news and demagoguery.
This human AI approach to improving society is not
a techno-utopia; it is this aspirational analogy that
places good data sources and rational discussion
frameworks at the core of a new social contract
between humans as well as between humans and
machines in 21 century societies. It is a vision
st
where humans and machines work together, each
leveraging its comparative advantages.
[8]
It is also not a vision that should be assessed in the
abstract or absolute; it is one that aims to improve
the state of a world with many ills, a lot of which
reflect and fuel bad information, bad faith, bad
decisions, bad behaviors, and abuses of power that
are rarely caught and even less often tackled. Our [9]
vision of a human AI is letting the good magic of AI
and the power of data challenge and improve old
decision-making systems and power structures to
improve human systems and the human experience, [10] S. M. Sosdian, R. Greenop, M. P. Hain, G. L.
with humans in the drivers’ seat.
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Y. N. Harari, “Why Technology Favors
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A. Pentland,
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[4] K. Cukier, “The data revolution,” The
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[Accessed: 03-Dec-2018].
[7] Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “The
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[Online]. Available:
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[Accessed: 03-Dec-2018].
E. T. Gershoff, “Spanking and Child
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M. Ehrenfreund, “There’s still no evidence
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