Just over one year ago, corporate AI ethics became a regular headline issue for the first time.

In December 2020, Google had fired Timnit Gebru—one of its top AI ethics researchers—and in February 2021, it would terminate her ethics team co-lead, Margaret Mitchell. Though Google disputes their version of events, the terminations helped push some of the field’s formerly niche debates to the forefront of the tech world.

Big picture: Every algorithm, whether it’s dictating the contents of a social media feed or deciding if someone can secure a loan, could have real-world impacts and the potential to harm as much as it might help.

• Policymakers, tech companies, and researchers are all grappling with how best to address that fact, which has become impossible to ignore.
• And that is, in a nutshell, the field of AI ethics.

To get a sense of how the field will evolve this year, we checked in with seven AI ethics leaders about the opportunities and challenges facing the field this year.

The question we posed: “What’s the single biggest advancement you foresee in the AI ethics field this year? Conversely, what’s the most significant challenge?”

Click here to read the full piece—we’ve included one answer below.

Deborah Raji, fellow at Mozilla:

I think for a long time, policymakers have sort of relied on narratives from corporations, research papers, and the media, and projected an image—a very idealistic image—of how well AI systems are working. But as they make their way into real-world systems and get deployed, we’re increasingly aware of the fact that these systems fail in really significant ways, and that those failures can actually result in a lot of real harm to those that are impacted.

Specifically, there’s been a lot of discussion on accountability for moderation systems, but we’re going to hear a conversation about the need for auditing and accountability more broadly. And specifically auditing from independent third-party actors—not just regulators, consultants, and internal teams, but actually getting some level of external scrutiny to assess the systems and challenge the narratives being told by the companies building them.

In terms of the actual obstacles to seeing that happen, I think that there’s a lot of incongruencies in terms of how auditors and algorithmic auditors currently work.

It’s all these different actors that want to hold these systems accountable, but are currently working in isolation from each other and not very well coordinated. You have internal auditors within companies, consultancies, [and] startups that are coming up with tools. Journalists, law firms, civil society—there’s just so many different institutions and stakeholders that identify as algorithmic auditors that I think there will need to be a lot more cohesion.

Click here to find out what the other six ethical AI experts predict for this year.—HF

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

We are a platform for individuals in any career to learn more about tech in order to advance their careers. 

What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?

We cover a lot, but for me, it is AR/VR—who will be the breakthrough firm?

What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?

This is the most thought-provoking article I have read about innovation. It has the stats on what I have believed as a techie all along: Innovation is tough work and requires a bit of luck to be in the right place at the right time to seize the opportunity.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

I learned to code [in] Fortran and established a computer club in my high school—believe it was 1968 or so.

Last week, we asked you all to take a guess at who would be the top dog in the US electric vehicle space in a decade.

Right now…It’s Tesla’s world, and everyone else is just driving in it. In Q2 2021, about two-thirds (66%) of all EVs registered in the US were Teslas, down from 79.5% in Q2 2020, but still far ahead of all competition.

• Chevy had the next-highest market share, at 9.6%, followed by  Ford, with 5.2%.

Your answer: A plurality of you (37%) think Tesla will maintain that top spot in a decade, but the majority of respondents think a different company will claim the title. But there’s disagreement over exactly which company that will be: 22% of you said Ford, 15% backed Toyota, 8.7% picked General Motors, and 5.7% went with Volkswagen.

Tesla may have a head start, but TBD on what legacy automakers are able to do with the piles of auto manufacturing expertise and brand loyalty they’ve accumulated over the last several decades. We’ll check back in on that question in…uh…2032.

Quick note: We’re going to adjust this segment to run every other week. So, no poll next week—but expect one the week after. Thanks for participating!

Click here to take this week’s poll on lab-grown meat.—DM

If you don’t already know, Morning Brew is on YouTube! Our shows cover the tech, trends, and companies you care about, but we do it in a way that won’t make your eyes burn from jargon or boredom. If you’re wondering how the world works—well, that makes two of us—let’s figure it out together. Check out some of our newest shows:

• Street Value - On the streets of NYC, we test people’s knowledge of NFTs, crypto, and—most importantly—Elon Musk
• Point of Return - We learn from regular folks, not financial advisors, about the best investment they ever made.
• Brew Breakdown - We break down questions, like: WTF is a credit score? How are hip-hop artists making bank with NFTs? How is the NIL changing college sports?
• Founder’s Journal - Morning Brew co-founder and Executive Chairman Alex Lieberman gives you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that’s building a business, a team, or a new product.

Stat: After climbing as high as 24% under the Trump administration, denial rates for H-1B visa petitions—the high-skilled foreign-worker visa often favored by tech firms—dropped to a record low 4% in 2021.

Quote: “I think [carbon removal] is going to probably take a path very much like the solar industry. The countries that choose to help and support will have great and really strong companies that are successful in that space.”—Ryan Panchadsaram, technical advisor to John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, in an interview with Emerging Tech Brew

Read: Cutting through the latest wave of autonomous vehicle hype.

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The website for which this section is named (ArXiv.org) is going through a rough patch as its library of academic papers grows exponentially, Scientific American reports.

Founded in 1989 as a simple email list, arXiv has become the go-to repository for scientific preprints (academic articles that have not yet been peer-reviewed). As a preprint server, arXiv can allow scientists to renew one-another’s findings more quickly than is possible with traditional peer review alone.

ArXiv now houses over 2 million papers, up from 1 million in 2014. The site is mostly volunteer-run, with only a few paid staff members to support its growing volume.

• “We’re an old classic car, and the rust has finally come through, and the pistons are wearing out,” Steinn Sigurdsson, arXiv’s scientific director said. “We are understaffed and underfunded—and have been for years.”

A handful of less newsy, more thinky pieces we think are worth checking out.

• Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike on Web3. Bonus: Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s response.
• Roblox’s alleged child-labor issues.
• Not only is e-water pollutive, it’s also a cybersecurity risk.
• The US’s biggest solar farm is coming to coal-friendly Indiana.
• Does machine learning spell the end of theory-driven science?
• A reading list of the best emerging tech predictions for 2022.

Just about 16 years ago, in mid–January 2006, the first Intel–equipped Macintosh computers shipped. Fast forward back to the present, and Apple is on its way to fully ditch the semiconductor giant in favor of its in-house chips.

The more things change, the more they…change?

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Cleantech investment exploded in 2021—and that momentum could continue this year
• A year after rolling out, GM’s B2B electric vehicle arm has signed major partners
• How a 21-year-old AI company just became a unicorn