Samsung president Young Sohn: ‘we should really worry about ethics’ in artificial intelligence

Young
Sohn
REUTERS/Tuomas
Forsell

• Samsung Electronics president Young Sohn told Business
  Insider that he worries about the ethics of artificial
  intelligence. “I think we should really worry about ethics.
  What is right? What is wrong?” he told us.
• “We’ve got to be principle-driven” he
  says. “But research for purpose, not for using
  that data to take advantage of all human beings.”
• Nonetheless, Sohn envisions a world where vast amounts
  of personal health and DNA data are stored online for use by
  AI-driven software. 

LISBON — Samsung Electronics president Young Sohn today
sketched an almost dystopian future in which every detail of your
life — all the way down to your individual DNA — is
tracked by vast “bio data banks” that store your genome, help
diagnose diseases, offer prognoses, and assist with disease
prevention.

The databases will be part of an explosion of data-based
businesses that will know almost everything about you, in a world
of “sensor pervasiveness.” Data sensors will provide
fantastically granular detail in tracking your blood, your car,
your food, the temperature of your home, and use artificial
intelligence to inform maps and public transportation, he said.

A screengrab from the
Samsung presentation at Web Summit.
Samsung / Web Summit /Twitter
screengrab

To give you an idea of just how far we are already into this
future, Sohn told the Web Summit conference in Lisbon that there
are already 340 trillion-trillion-trillion IP addresses on the
planet (that’s 10 to the power of 37), mostly inside connected
devices that already have the ability to talk to each other. For
scale, there are only 100 billion stars in the galaxy, and only
100 billion neurones in the average human brain.

In an interview with Business Insider after his speech, we put it
to Sohn that there was a lot about his vision that was troubling.

“I worry about that,” he told us. “That’s why I brought up these
questions of ethics. I mean, I think we should really worry about
ethics. What is right? What is wrong? That’s why I made a
comment, we’ve got to be principle-driven. And the research?
Great. But research for purpose, not for using that data to take
advantage of all human beings out there.”

Samsung envisions a
sensor-pervasive world that tracks everything you do.
Samsung / Web Summit / Twitter
screengrab

In his keynote, Sohn had described the coming explosion in
AI-driven data as an “opportunity.” “It’s not just for China, not
just for the Americans, data is a global opportunity,” he said.
“There are many opportunities to disrupt the world here.”

But there are also many opportunities to invade people’s privacy,
or to curtail their rights based on the data stored about them.
In
China, for instance, the government has started using citizens’
credit scores against them, by restricting the travel of
people with low scores, reducing their internet access and
preventing their children from attending the best schools.

“So, I don’t agree with Chinese support for social score, I think
that’s a problem,” Sohn told Business Insider. “And I think we
also have to be very careful of how the data is shared, even by
Google link, any big platform companies, we should be mindful of
that because power in the hands of [people with] wrong purpose
can create abuse. I’m not a politician. But as technologists I
think we need to be more truly aware of what we are doing. It’s
more education [needed] right there.”

He quickly added, “Your data on a Samsung phone stays with
Samsung on your phone, Samsung doesn’t have any access to your
phone.”

Sohn said he is really hoping that AI and big data will be used
to improve everyone’s health. In his speech, he envisioned DNA
data being widely available for research and AI. “We need to have
the genome data that’s available,” he said, so that companies can
begin “creating a unified database that can be able to help us
from, genomes to phenomes, and other data types.”

DNA and genomics will be a
big part of it.
Samsung / Web Summit /
Twitter screengrab

“Genomics is the bridge,” he said. With “information around our
blood, we will be able to make correlations with different
diseases, diagnosis, prognoses and prevention over time.”

Business Insider asked him to expand on that in a conversation
backstage. “I think we only know about 7 to 8 percent of our
body, from a medical [standpoint], so I am hoping we create more,
and learn what we don’t know. Through that process we can have a
better correlation between diseases … so that’s what I really
meant. How do you do that? Well you start with the data, and you
start with AI, because one of the things with AI is, you make
connections where you’d never expect it.”

But he agreed that the process could be open to abuse. In his
speech he also warned, “We have issues that we really have to
think through … the ethics of AI.”