"Ethical Issues with AI," TODAY at 3:30pm

[Daniel Lake]

 *The Institute for Ethics in Public Life invites you to join us for
"Ethical Issues with AI", Wed., Feb. 12 (TODAY) at 3:30pm with special
guests Dr. Del Hart, Dr. Kevin McCullen, and Dr. Jan Plaza of the
Department of Computer Science.*

The rapid increase in the capabilities of generative artificial
intelligence has continued since our last conversation on the issue. Most
recently, "reasoning models" such as OpenAI's o1 and  DeepSeek's R1 have
been released. These can answer harder, more complex questions and they
take the time to basically "think through" the question and check their
work before responding, thus reducing the error rate as compared with
non-reasoning models (like ChatGPT).

While R1 does not require as much computing power to run as o1, nor is it
as energy intensive to run, reasoning models still raise many ethical
issues starting with the hardware and energy demands necessary to train and
operate them. AI firms continue to invest in new data centers, and so far
this is resulting in large increases in the energy consumed for AI
purposes. One anticipated impact of AI-related investment in computing is
that the total energy consumption of global data centers is expected to
more than double between 2022 and 2026, from 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) to
more than 1000 TWh. This is likely to make the green energy transition more
difficult due to the increased demand for power, and these data centers
will both generate a lot of waste heat and will require a lot of fresh
water for cooling. Google's data centers used 4.3 billion gallons of fresh
water in 2021 alone, and the newest data centers are larger and generally
require more water - up to 5 million gallons per day (the same as a town of
50,000 people). The fact that many of these data centers are located in
areas that are prone to drought just makes this issue worse.

The new AI models also require a lot of data to train on, whether it be
text, images, or sounds. In many cases so far they have been trained on
data publicly available on the internet. While publicly available, much of
the data used is protected by copyright laws and thus its use for training
AIs is questionable ethically, to say nothing of its possible illegality.


Another issue with AIs is accuracy and bias. The reasoning models have one
major advantage over non-reasoning models in that they are able to explain
how they came to their conclusions. This, combined with the lower
error-rate associated with these models, means it is less likely that they
will make errors that are not noticed or understood. Nevertheless, there
are still questions about who has liability for any harm that results from
their use, and so far there remains a potential for bias in their responses
due to biases that exist in the data used to train them.

Finally, there are real questions about what impact AI will have on
society. AI is already starting to disrupt sectors of the economy, and this
impact is going to keep growing for as new AIs come online. Will this
transform society into one in which a small elite is able to exploit the
capabilities of AI to enrich and empower themselves while the majority of
society is relegated to relative poverty, or will access to AI serve to
democratize the economy and spread prosperity? And how can we adequately
prepare our students to ethically use these new tools, as is required by
the new SUNY GE standard?

Daniel Lake is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: "Ethical Issues with AI"
Time: Feb 12, 2025 03:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://plattsburgh.zoom.us/j/82723290647
<https://www.google.com/url?q=https://plattsburgh.zoom.us/j/82723290647&sa=D&source=calendar&ust=1739551347740273&usg=AOvVaw06zp0OD8J39N7acpnFiyta>

Meeting ID: 827 2329 0647

Upcoming:

Feb. 19 - Nothing scheduled, due to a workshop at the same time.

Feb. 26 - Local government and politics during a time of high political
polarization with Matt Veitch '94, Supervisor, City of Saratoga.

You can also see upcoming events on the Institute's


-- 

*Daniel Lake*

(pronouns: he/him/his)

Assoc. Prof. of Political Science

Director, Institute for Ethics in Public Life

Hawkins 149A

101 Broad Street
<https://maps.google.com/?q=101+Broad+Street+Plattsburgh,+NY+12901&entry=gmail&source=g>

Plattsburgh, NY 12901
<https://maps.google.com/?q=101+Broad+Street+Plattsburgh,+NY+12901&entry=gmail&source=g>

(o) 518-564-5833 <(518)%5645833>

*plattsburgh.edu <http://plattsburgh.edu/>*
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