The moral dilemmas of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Scientists are already struggling with such dilemmas. As we enter the new machine age, we need a new set of codified morals to become the global norm. We should put as much emphasis on ethics as we put on fashionable terms like disruption.
This is starting to happen. Last year, America’s Carnegie Mellon University announced a new centre studying the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence; under President Obama, the White House published a paper on the same topic; and tech giants including Facebook and Google have announced a partnership to draw up an ethical framework for AI. Both the risks and the opportunities are vast: Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and other experts signed an open lettercalling for efforts to ensure AI is beneficial to society:
“The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.”
Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder of the World Economic Forum, believes this phase will be built around “cyber-physical systems” with the blurring of the physical, digital and biological. As we embrace this machine age, we will need be confronted by new ethical challenges, calling for new laws. In some cases the entire moral code may need to be rebooted. Such is the nature of technological breakthroughs. We believe that humanity will soon be on the cusp of re-thinking morals – an Ethics 2.0.
Ethics derived from philosophy or religion do not easily fit into the world of technology. Everything from Aristotle to the Ten Commandments give us moral navigation – but any established set of rules tends to run into dilemmas. The world of science also has its share of attempts, from Asimov’s Three Laws for Robots to Nick Bostrom’s work on ethics. However, humans find it hard enough to develop virtues for their own conduct, let alone building relevant virtues into new technologies.
The ethical implications range from the immediate (how are the algorithms behind Facebook and Google influencing everything from our emotions to our elections?) to the future (what will happen if self-driving vehicles mean there are no more jobs for truck drivers?). Following is a sample, by no means exhaustive, of the ethical decisions which will face us:
Life Sciences.
