Guest post by The Futures Agency content curator Petervan

MMC Ventures, a research-led venture capital firm, together with Barclays UK Ventures just published “The State of AI: Divergence” an extensive 150+ page report on the investment opportunities and risks in the current AI landscape. If you are not yet familiar with this space, this is for sure a good primer on the subject.

With our humanistic lens, we tried to uncover possible ethical considerations that investors may have. Here is one of the more powerful lines of the report, that touches on the increasingly urgent topic of digital ethics:

“If we fail to make ethical and inclusive AI, we risk losing gains made in civil rights and gender equity under the guise of machine neutrality, and….. GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) also present profound ethical and societal risks.”

The report also included some high-level ethical recommendations for executives, entrepreneurs, and investors.

• Executives should develop rigorous ethical frameworks to govern the AI systems you develop and use.

• Entrepreneurs should develop robust frameworks for ethical development and regulatory compliance. 


• Investors should assess entrepreneurs’ awareness of AI’s ethical risks, their mitigation strategies and compliance with regulatory best practices.

Towards the end, the report included an interesting table of possible individual and collective social harms for algorithmic decision-making. Optimists at heart, we could not withhold ourselves looking at this map as more of an opportunity map, with each of the ‘harms' actually presenting an area for improvement of our human happiness.

Please find some of the best charts from the report below.