The Download: California’s AI power plans, and and why it’s so hard to make welfare AI fair

California's statewide power grid operator is poised to become the first in North America to deploy artificial intelligence to manage outages, MIT Technology Review has learned.

At an industry summit in Minneapolis tomorrow, the California Independent System Operator is set to announce a deal to run a pilot program using new AI software called Genie, from the energy-services giant OATI.

The software uses generative AI to analyze and carry out real-time analyses for grid operators and comes with the potential to autonomously make decisions about key functions on the grid, a switch that might resemble going from uniformed traffic officers to sensor-equipped stoplights. Read the full story.

—Alexander C. Kaufman

Why it’s so hard to make welfare AI fair

There are plenty of stories about AI that’s caused harm when deployed in sensitive situations, and in many of those cases, the systems were developed without much concern to what it meant to be fair or how to implement fairness.

But the city of Amsterdam did spend a lot of time and money to try to create ethical AI—in fact, it followed every recommendation in the responsible AI playbook. But when it deployed it in the real world, it still couldn’t remove biases. So why did Amsterdam fail? And more importantly: Can this ever be done right?

Join our editor Amanda Silverman, investigative reporter Eileen Guo and Gabriel Geiger, an investigative reporter from Lighthouse Reports, for a subscriber-only Roundtables conversation at 1pm ET on Wednesday July 30 to explore if algorithms can ever be fair. Register here!