Can we teach morality to machines? Three perspectives on ethics for artificial intelligence

Today, it is difficult to imagine a technology that is as enthralling and terrifying as machine learning. While media coverage and research papers consistently tout the potential of machine learning to become the biggest driver of positive change in business and society, the lingering question on everyone’s mind is: “Well, what if it all goes terribly wrong?”

For years, experts have warned against the unanticipated effects of general artificial intelligence (AI) on society. Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2029 intelligent machines will be able to outsmart human beings. Stephen Hawking argues that “once humans develop full AI, it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate”. Elon Musk warns that AI may constitute a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization”. Alarmist views on the terrifying potential of general AI abound in the media.

More often than not, these dystopian prophecies have been met with calls for a more ethical implementation of AI systems; that somehow engineers should imbue autonomous systems with a sense of ethics. According to some AI experts, we can teach our future robot overlords to tell right from wrong, akin to a “Good Samaritan AI” that will always act justly on its own and help humans in distress.

Although this future is still decades away, today there is much uncertainty as to how, if at all, we will reach this level of general machine intelligence. But what is more crucial, at the moment, is that even the narrow AI applications that exist today require our urgent attention in the ways in which they are making moral decisions in practical day-to-day situations. For example, this is relevant when algorithms make decisions about who gets access to loans or when self-driving cars have to calculate the value of a human life in hazardous traffic situations.

Teaching morality to machines is hard because humans can’t objectively convey morality in measurable metrics that make it easy for a computer to process. In fact, it is even questionable whether we, as humans have a sound understanding of morality at all that we can all agree on. In moral dilemmas, humans tend to rely on gut feeling instead of elaborate cost-benefit calculations. Machines, on the other hand, need explicit and objective metrics that can be clearly measured and optimized.

For example, an AI player can excel in games with clear rules and boundaries by learning how to optimize the score through repeated playthroughs. After its experiments with deep reinforcement learning on Atari video games, Alphabet’s DeepMind was able to beat the best human players of Go. Meanwhile, OpenAI amassed “lifetimes” of experiences tobeat the best human players at the Valve Dota 2 tournament, one of the most popular e-sports competitions globally.

But in real-life situations, optimization problems are vastly more complex. For example, how do you teach a machine to algorithmically maximise fairness or to overcome racial and gender biases in its training data? A machine cannot be taught what is fair unless the engineers designing the AI system have a precise conception of what fairness is.

This has led some authors to worry that a naive application of algorithms to everyday problems could amplify structural discrimination and reproduce biases in the data they are based on. In theworst case, algorithms could deny services to minorities, impede people’s employment opportunities or get the wrong political candidate elected. Some people have argued that the use of AI in politics already had disastrous consequences.

So what can we do about it? Based on our experiences in machine learning, we believe there are three ways to begin designing more ethically aligned machines with the following guidelines:

AI researchers and ethicists need to formulate ethical values as quantifiable parameters.