Anne Washington, assistant professor of data policy, testified before Congress at a hearing held by the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee on September 12, 2019.
The Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, chaired by Representative Bill Foster, convened "The Future of Identity in Financial Services: Threats, Challenges, and Opportunities,” to discuss mistaken identity, Bitcoin, and financial data privacy.
Even the most successful artificial intelligence system used by online financial platforms requires human input.
Anne Washington, assistant professor of data policy at NYU Steinhardt, shared her research on artificial intelligence at a congressional hearing.
In her testimony, Washington noted that on the surface, artificial intelligence appears to be “neutral, mechanical, and routine-driven," but "when placed within human societies, can have substantial repercussions in our daily lives."
She told the task force that artiificial intelligence is not infallible, and that mistakes in artificial intelligence are "statistically inevitable."
She suggested that organizations adopt procedures that "integrate the authority of individual lived experience."
Washington is a computer scientist and organizational scholar who has expertise in open government data. Her multi-disciplinary work examines the impact of technology on society through the lens of digital record keeping. She is the recipient of a 5-year National Science Foundation career grant on the reuse of open government data. She teaches a graduate-level course on the ethics of data science at NYU Steinhardt.