Head of Sony Group's AI Ethics Office talks about women in STEM at CES 2023

Alice Xiang, Head of Sony Group's AI Ethics Office and AI Lead Research Scientist, spoke to Yahoo Finance in collaboration with Built By Girls about the importance of diversity in the room when creating products of the future like artificial intelligence (AI).

Video Transcript

- You know, you have a really interesting background. You have a law degree. You have this background in statistics. Built by Girls sent us a question asking what advice you would give to, say, a young woman who's interested in entering the AI field.

ALICE XIANG: Yeah, thank you for that question. I mean, first, I would say, please do enter this field. It's extremely not diverse at the moment. And that's a huge issue when we think about addressing issues like systemic bias in AI. It does start at the point of, who is actually in the room when you're talking about developing an AI product? And that set of people needs to be diverse. We need to have a wide variety of perspectives. In terms of concrete advice, I think it's always good to have a strong technical foundation of what AI is, how it works.

But increasingly, especially in the AI ethics field, what we really need is more folks with a strong interdisciplinary background who can understand multiple fields and think about how new technologies might be able to interact with humans and society in ways that might produce intended or unintended consequences. And so I think it's a really exciting space for young women and everyone else. And I really hope that more people enter this field and that we see more of a diverse set of researchers and developers in the future.