China’s top AI scientist drives development of ethical guidelines

China is playing catch-up in the development of ethical guidelines in the field of artificial intelligence, with the establishment of an ethics committee. Chen Xiaoping – inventor of Jia Jia, the realistic humanoid “Robot Goddess”, and KeJia, an intelligent home service robot – is leading the committee, which held its first conference last year and is due to meet again in May.

Chen, professor and director of the Robotics Laboratory at the University of Science and Technology of China, said AI in China had developed to a point where ethical guidelines were now necessary to address potential risks in large-scale applications. “If the technology was far off being applied there would be no need to talk about ethics research, but there is value in this research into technologies that might be applied on a large scale in the next 10 or 20 years,” he said.

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