February 20 | AI's Hippocratic Oath

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, February 20th from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for a conversation with Chinmayi Sharma, Associate Professor at Fordham Law School. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and streamed via YouTube, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. This session will take place in Encina Hall, on the 3rd floor in the Oksenberg Conference Room.

Diagnosing diseases, creating artwork, offering companionship, analyzing data, and securing our infrastructure—artificial intelligence (AI) does it all. But it does not always do it well. AI can be wrong, biased, and manipulative. In her most recent article, Chinmayi Sharma argues that the heart of the problem is not the technology but its creators: AI engineers who either don’t know how to, or are told not to, build better systems. She proposes a novel solution to the AI problem: professionalizing AI engineering. Require AI engineers to obtain licenses to build commercial AI products, push them to collaborate on scientifically-supported, domain-specific technical standards, and charge them with policing themselves. In doing so, she seeks to shift the discourse on AI away from an emphasis on light-touch, ex post solutions that address already-created products to a greater focus on ex ante controls that precede AI development. Society has used this playbook before in fields requiring a high level of expertise where a duty to the public welfare must trump business motivations. What if, like doctors, AI engineers also vowed to do no harm?

About the Speaker

Chinmayi Sharma is an Associate Professor at Fordham Law School. Her research and teaching focus on open internet governance, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, computer crime, and torts.

She is a Cybersecurity and Technology Fellow at the Strauss Center, a Non-Resident Fellow with the Center for Democracy and Technology and is affiliated with the Atlantic Council, the Transatlantic Cyber Forum, Foreign Policy for America (FP4A), and the Internet Law and Policy Foundry.

Her scholarship has been included in the Hague's International Cyber Security Bibliography. She has written extensively for Lawfare and has been quoted by NPR, ProPublica, the New York Times, News12, and Schneier on Security. Before joining academia, Chinmayi worked at Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis LLP, a telecommunications law firm in Washington, D.C., clerked for Chief Judge Michael F. Urbanski of the Western District of Virginia, and co-founded a software development company.