Top Nine Ethical Issues In Artificial Intelligence
Our lives are being transformed every day for the better by intelligent machine systems. The more capable these systems become, the more efficient our world becomes.
Some of today’s tech giants believe that artificial intelligence (AI) should be more widely utilized. However, there are many ethical and risk assessment issues to be considered before this can become reality. We discuss these below.
1. How Do We Deal With Unemployment?
The majority of people sell most of their waking time just to have enough income to keep themselves and their families alive. The success of AI, because of the amount of time it saves, will provide people the opportunity to spend more time caring for their families, become involved in their communities and experience new ways of contributing to human society.
Let’s take, for example, the trucking industry, where millions of people are employed in the United States alone. If Tesla’s Elon Musk delivers on his promise of offering true self-driving cars (and by extension, delivery trucks) and they become widely available within the next decade, then what’s going to happen to those millions of people? But self-driving trucks do seem like an ethical option when we consider their ability to lower our accident rates.
2. How Can We Equitably Distribute The Wealth Created By Machines?
AI, if it becomes widely used, can reduce a company’s reliance on the human workforce, which means that revenues will go primarily to people who own AI-driven companies.
Already, we are seeing startup founders take home the majority of the economic surplus they generate. So how do we equitably distribute the wealth created by machines?
3. Can Machines Influence Our Behavior And Interactions?
AI bots are becoming more effective at imitating human relationships and conversations. A major breakthrough on this front occurred in 2015 when a bot named Eugene Goostman became the first computer to pass the Turing test. This challenge requires human raters to use text input to chat with an unknown entity, and then guess whether the entity is human or machine. Over half of the raters chatting with Eugene Goostman believed it was human.
While this can prove very useful in nudging society toward more beneficial behavior, it can also prove detrimental in the wrong hands.
4. How Do We Guard Against Possible Detrimental Mistakes?
Intelligence results from learning, whether you’re human or machine. Systems normally have a training phase where they “learn” to detect the right patterns and act according to their input. After the training phase, the system then goes to the test phase where more scenarios are thrown at it to see how it performs.
Because it is highly unlikely that the training phase can cover all the possible scenarios that the system may encounter in the real world, the system can be fooled in ways that humans wouldn’t be. Therefore, if we are to rely on AI to replace human labor, we need to ensure it performs as planned and cannot be overpowered by humans with selfish intentions.
Let’s not forget that AI systems are created by humans, who can sometimes be very judgmental and biased. Yes, AI, if used right, can become a catalyst for positive change, but it can also fuel discrimination.
