I'm Lee Rowland from the ACLU.

This is At Liberty, the show where we discuss today's biggest civil rights and civil liberties topics.

Today, artificial intelligence. It's everywhere. In our homes, in our cars, our offices, and of course, online. So maybe it should come as no surprise that government decisions are also being outsourced to computer code. In one Pennsylvania County, for example, child and family services uses digital tools to assess the likelihood that a

child is at risk of abuse. Los Angeles contracts with the data giant Palantir to engage in

predictive policing in which algorithms identify residents who might commit future crimes.

Local police departments are buying Amazon's facial recognition tool, which can automatically

identify people as they go about their lives in public. What does all this mean for our civil

liberties? And how do we exercise oversight of an algorithm? Here to talk

through this brave new world with us is Meredith Whitaker. She's co-founder and executive director

of AI Now, a research institute that studies the social implications of artificial intelligence.

Meredith is a distinguished research scientist at New York University,

the founder of Google's Open Research Group, and an expert on digital privacy and security issues.

Meredith, thank you so much for being with us today. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for

speaking with me. Of course. So let's start big, maybe with just some definitional terms.

What do we mean when we talk about AI, artificial intelligence?

This is a great and fundamental question, and I want to put everyone who's asking it at ease

by letting you know that even the most technically adept people struggle with this.

AI is not a clearly fixed term, and it often means slightly different things to different

people.

This is in part because this is a field that's evolved over many years, and because it's also

a very hyped marketing term at this point.

So the term AI is being used to sell everything, some of which resembles what we

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