Starting Now On Technology Ethics: Elizabeth Renieris

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
Ethical use of technology is and should be a concern for organizations everywhere. But it's complicated. Today we talk with Elizabeth Renieris, founding director of the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab, about what organizations can do today without waiting for the perfect answer.
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence in business. In each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, professor of information systems at Boston College. I'm also the guest editor for the AI and Business Strategy Big Idea Program at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:41)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG, and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. And together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching AI for five years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities across the organization and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:10)
Today, we're talking with Elizabeth Renieris. Elizabeth is the founding director of the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab, as well as founder and CEO of Hackylawyer.
Elizabeth, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. Welcome.

**Elizabeth Renieris** (1:22)
Thanks for having me.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:24)
Let's start with your current role, your current new role at the Notre Dame-IBM.

**Elizabeth Renieris** (1:29)
I was going to ask which one.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:31)
Well, I was thinking about the ethics lab, but you actually can start with wherever you like.

**Elizabeth Renieris** (1:37)
Sure.
So as you mentioned, I've been recently appointed as the founding director of a new technology ethics lab at the University of Notre Dame.
It's actually called the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab, as the generous seed funding is actually from IBM. My appointment is a faculty appointment with the University of Notre Dame, and the intention of the lab is to complement Notre Dame's existing technology ethics center, which is a very traditional academic research center focused on technology ethics.
So you can imagine there are many tenured faculty members affiliated with the center, and they produce sort of traditional academic research, peer-reviewed journal articles. The lab, in contrast to that, is meant to focus on practitioner-oriented artifacts. So the things that we want to produce are for audiences that include companies themselves, but also for law and policy makers, also for civil society and other stakeholders, and we want them to be very tangible and very practical. So we're looking to produce things like open source toolkits and model legislation and explainer videos and model audits and a whole array of things that you wouldn't necessarily find from a traditional academic research center. What we really need in this space is we need centers and institutions that can translate between academia and practice. The beauty of housing the lab in the university, of course, is having access to the faculty that's generating the scholarship and the theoretical foundations for the work.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (3:06)
Can you comment a bit more on how you guys make that happen? Because I know there's a lot of primary research, and then you have the faculty's point of view. I assume that there's also industry connections and some of these applications in real life coming to play, which is really important, as you say.
What are some of the ways you guys enable that?

**Elizabeth Renieris** (3:28)
Right now, as we're getting up and running, really what we're focusing on is convening power. We're looking to convene groups of people who aren't necessarily talking to each other and to do a lot of that translation work. So right now, the intention is to put out an official call for proposals to the general public and to be sourcing projects from all the different stakeholders that I outlined, consisting of teams of individuals who come from different industries and sectors and represent different sectors of society and to have them focus on projects that actually try and solve real-world challenges. So, for example, right now, during the pandemic, those challenges might be something like returning to work or returning to school.
And then, of course, what we want to do as the lab is we want to take the brilliant work that the faculty at Notre Dame is doing and eventually elsewhere and leverage that to sort of underpin and to inform the actual projects that we're sourcing, and we can hopefully build some kind of narrative arc around how you start translating that theory into practice.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (4:29)
It seems like you're looking at ethics and AI from two sides, right? One is the ethics of the technology itself, as in is what the technology doing ethical and how do you make sure it is ethical?