Ethics of artificial intelligence
The ethics of artificial intelligence is the branch of the ethics of technology specific to artificial intelligence (AI) systems.[1]
The ethics of artificial intelligence covers a broad range of topics within the field that are considered to have particular ethical stakes. This includes algorithmic biases, fairness, automated decision-making, accountability, privacy, and regulation. It also covers various emerging or potential future challenges such as machine ethics (how to make machines that behave ethically), lethal autonomous weapon systems, arms race dynamics, AI safety and alignment, technological unemployment, AI-enabled misinformation, how to treat certain AI systems if they have a moral status (AI welfare and rights), artificial superintelligence and existential risks.[1] Some application areas may also have particularly important ethical implications, like healthcare, education, or the military.
Emergent or potential future challenges[edit]
Increasing use[edit]
AI has been slowly making its presence more known throughout the world, from chat bots that seemingly have answers for every homework question to Generative artificial intelligence that can create a painting about whatever one desires. AI has become increasingly popular in hiring markets, from the ads that target certain people according to what they are looking for to the inspection of applications of potential hires. Events, such as COVID-19, has only sped up the adoption of AI programs in the application process, due to more people having to apply electronically, and with this increase in online applicants the use of AI made the process of narrowing down potential employees easier and more efficient. AI has become more prominent as businesses have to keep up with the times and ever-expanding internet. Processing analytics and making decisions becomes much easier with the help of AI.[41] As Tensor Processing Unit (TPUs) and Graphics processing unit (GPUs) become more powerful, AI capabilities also increase, forcing companies to use it to keep up with the competition. Managing customers' needs and automating many parts of the workplace leads to companies having to spend less money on employees.
AI has also seen increased usage in criminal justice and healthcare. For medicinal means, AI is being used more often to analyze patient data to make predictions about future patients' conditions and possible treatments. These programs are called Clinical decision support system (DSS). AI's future in healthcare may develop into something further than just recommended treatments, such as referring certain patients over others, leading to the possibility of inequalities.[74]
History[edit]
Historically speaking, the investigation of moral and ethical implications of "thinking machines" goes back at least to the Enlightenment: Leibniz already poses the question if we might attribute intelligence to a mechanism that behaves as if it were a sentient being,[155] and so does Descartes, who describes what could be considered an early version of the Turing test.[156]
The romantic period has several times envisioned artificial creatures that escape the control of their creator with dire consequences, most famously in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The widespread preoccupation with industrialization and mechanization in the 19th and early 20th century, however, brought ethical implications of unhinged technical developments to the forefront of fiction: R.U.R – Rossum's Universal Robots, Karel Čapek's play of sentient robots endowed with emotions used as slave labor is not only credited with the invention of the term 'robot' (derived from the Czech word for forced labor, robota) but was also an international success after it premiered in 1921. George Bernard Shaw's play Back to Methuselah, published in 1921, questions at one point the validity of thinking machines that act like humans; Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis shows an android leading the uprising of the exploited masses against the oppressive regime of a technocratic society.
In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov considered the issue of how to control machines in I, Robot. At the insistence of his editor John W. Campbell Jr., he proposed the Three Laws of Robotics to govern artificially intelligent systems. Much of his work was then spent testing the boundaries of his three laws to see where they would break down, or where they would create paradoxical or unanticipated behavior.[157] His work suggests that no set of fixed laws can sufficiently anticipate all possible circumstances.[158] More recently, academics and many governments have challenged the idea that AI can itself be held accountable.[159] A panel convened by the United Kingdom in 2010 revised Asimov's laws to clarify that AI is the responsibility either of its manufacturers, or of its owner/operator.[160]
Eliezer Yudkowsky, from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute suggested in 2004 a need to study how to build a "Friendly AI", meaning that there should also be efforts to make AI intrinsically friendly and humane.[161]
In 2009, academics and technical experts attended a conference organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence to discuss the potential impact of robots and computers, and the impact of the hypothetical possibility that they could become self-sufficient and make their own decisions. They discussed the possibility and the extent to which computers and robots might be able to acquire any level of autonomy, and to what degree they could use such abilities to possibly pose any threat or hazard.[162] They noted that some machines have acquired various forms of semi-autonomy, including being able to find power sources on their own and being able to independently choose targets to attack with weapons. They also noted that some computer viruses can evade elimination and have achieved "cockroach intelligence". They noted that self-awareness as depicted in science-fiction is probably unlikely, but that there were other potential hazards and pitfalls.[117]
Also in 2009, during an experiment at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, Switzerland, robots that were programmed to cooperate with each other (in searching out a beneficial resource and avoiding a poisonous one) eventually learned to lie to each other in an attempt to hoard the beneficial resource.[163]