Explainability – optimizing for ethics, caveats, and responsibility

Ethics and responsibility play a foundational role in dealing with your customers’ data and behavior and because most of you will build products that help assist humans to make decisions, eventually someone is going to ask you how your product arrives at conclusions. Critical thinking is one of the foundational cornerstones of human reasoning and if your product is rooted in DL, your answer won’t be able to truly satisfy anyone’s skepticism. Our heartfelt advice is this: don’t create a product that will harm people, get you sued, or pose a risk to your business.

If you’re leveraging ML or DL in a capacity that has even the potential to cause harm to others, if there’s a clear bias that affects underrepresented or minority groups (in terms of race, gender, or culture), go back to the ideation phase. This is true whether that’s immediate or downstream harm. This...