As the world increasingly turns to artificial intelligence (AI) to help solve pressing health and development challenges, Surgo Foundation wants to make sure that people working on these issues study, and scale up on, the use of causal AI—a key area of specialty and investment for the organization.
Causal AI can help identify the precise relationships of cause and effect—the root causes of why people do what they do. Much of AI in common use is predictive—dedicated to predicting a particular outcome, or how people are going to behave. But predicting an outcome or a behavior is not the same as understanding what actually causes it. And if we do not know the root causes of behavior, we can easily make poor decisions and support ineffective and prejudicial policies.
Read Surgo's "The Case for Causal AI" in the Summer 2020 edition of Stanford Social Innovation Review.