Google Quietly Disbanded Another AI Review Board Following Disagreements
April 14 2019 - 9:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Parmy Olson
LONDON -- Google is disbanding a panel here to review its
artificial-intelligence work in health care, people familiar with
the matter say, as disagreements about its effectiveness dogged one
of the tech industry's highest-profile efforts to govern
itself.
The Alphabet Inc. unit is struggling with how best to set
guidelines for its sometimes-sensitive work in AI -- the ability
for computers to replicate tasks that only humans could do in the
past. It also highlights the challenges Silicon Valley faces in
setting up self-governance systems as governments around the world
scrutinize issues ranging from privacy and consent to the growing
influence of social media and screen addiction among children.
AI has recently become a target in that stepped-up push for
oversight as some sensitive decision-making -- including employee
recruitment, health-care diagnoses and law-enforcement profiling --
is increasingly being outsourced to algorithms. The European
Commission is proposing a set of AI ethical guidelines and
researchers have urged companies to adopt similar rules. But
industry efforts to conduct such oversight in-house have been
mixed.
Earlier this month, for instance, Google unveiled a
high-profile, global, independent ethics council to guide it on the
responsible development of all of its AI-related research and
products. A week later, it disbanded the council following an
outpouring of protests about the panel's makeup.
In a post earlier this month, Kent Walker, Google's senior vice
president for global affairs, said the company "was going back to
the drawing board."
Months earlier, in late 2018, Google began to wind down another
independent panel set up to do the same thing -- this time for a
division in the U.K. doing AI work related to health care. At the
time, Google said it was rethinking that board because of a
reorganization in its health-care-focused businesses.
But the move also came amid disagreements between panel members
and DeepMind, Google's U.K.-based AI research unit, according to
people familiar with the matter. Those differences centered on the
review panel's ability to access information about research and
products, the binding power of their recommendations and the amount
of independence that DeepMind could maintain from Google, according
to these people.
A spokeswoman for DeepMind's health-care unit in the U.K.
declined to comment specifically about the board's deliberations.
After the reorganization, the company found that the board, called
the Independent Review Panel, was "unlikely to be the right
structure in the future."
Google bought DeepMind in 2014, promising it a degree of
autonomy to pursue its research on artificial intelligence. In
2016, DeepMind set up a special unit called DeepMind Health to
focus on health-care-related opportunities. At the same time,
DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman unveiled a board of nine
veterans of government and industry, drawn from the arts, sciences
and technology sectors, to meet once a quarter and scrutinize its
work with the U.K.'s publicly funded health service. Among its
tasks, the group had to produce a public annual report.
Two months after its founding, DeepMind Health admitted missteps
in accessing records of 1.6 million patients in the U.K. without
proper disclosure from the partnering hospital to patients. The
board was praised for going on to publicly raise concerns in its
annual report about the lack of clarity around that data-sharing
agreement, and for recommending that DeepMind Health publish all
future contracts with public health providers, a recommendation the
division complied with.
But internally, some board members chafed at their inability to
review the full extent of the group's AI research and the unit's
strategic plans, according to the people familiar with the matter.
Members of the board weren't asked to sign nondisclosure agreements
about the information they received. Some directors felt that
limited the amount of information the company shared with them and
thus the board's effectiveness, according to one person.
Not all board members felt cut out. "We were told a huge amount
of stuff and trusted to be responsible with it," said Julian
Hubbert, a former British lawmaker who was on the review board.
Tensions increased when DeepMind Health told the independent
board that Google was taking a more hands-on approach to running
the unit, according to these people. In November, DeepMind Health
announced that one of its best-known projects, an app called
Streams that helps hospital doctors in the U.K. detect kidney
disease, would be run from Google's Mountain View, Calif.,
headquarters. That transition is still in progress.
Google said it would build the app into an "AI-powered assistant
for nurses and doctors everywhere." That caused concern in public
health and privacy circles because of previous assurances from
Google and DeepMind that the two wouldn't share health records.
DeepMind Health was renamed Google Health, becoming part of an
umbrella division uniting Google's other health-focused units like
health-tracking platform Google Fit and Verily, a life-sciences
research arm.
Inside the review board, many directors felt blindsided,
according to people familiar with the matter. Some directors
complained they could have played a helpful role in explaining the
change of control of the Streams app to the public if given earlier
insight.
The review panel still plans to publish a final "lessons
learned" report, according to a person familiar with the matter,
which will make recommendations about how better to set up such
boards in the future.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 14, 2019 10:14 ET (14:14 GMT)
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