Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to revolutionise the mobility industry, but carries almost as much potential risk and concern as it does benefit. The concept of bringing human intelligence to inanimate objects has been around for millennia—the ancient Greek myth of Talos tells of a giant robot imbued with the life force of the gods. The field of AI was officially founded in the 1950s, but it has only recently begun to take off in the automotive sector with fleet management, traffic prediction, autonomous driving, speech recognition and more.
Growth has been rapid but largely ungoverned. “As automated systems develop, they offer the possibility for positive advancements—but unchecked, AI has led to unconsented surveillance, discrimination from algorithmic bias, and other foreseeable harms”—that’s the warning outlined by the authors of the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, published in October 2022 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The document is intended to guide the design, use and deployment of automated systems in a safe way.
