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Ethics of Artificial
Intelligence
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The ethics of artificial intelligence is the part of the ethics of technology specific
to robots and other artificially intelligent beings. It is typically[citation needed]
divided into roboethics, a concern with the moral behavior of humans as they
design, construct, use and treat artificially intelligent beings, and machine
ethics, concern with the moral behavior of artificial moral agents (AMAs).
Roboethics
The term "roboethics" was coined by roboticist Gianmarco Veruggio in 2002,
referring to the morality of how humans design, construct, use and treat robots
and other artificially intelligent beings. It considers both how artificially
intelligent beings may be used to harm humans and how they may be used to
benefit humans.
Robot rights
Robot rights are the moral obligations of society towards its machines, similar
to human rights or animal rights. These may include the right to life and liberty,
freedom of thought and expression and equality before the law. The issue has
been considered by the Institute for the Future and by the U.K. Department of
Trade and Industry.
Experts disagree whether specific and detailed laws will be required soon or
safely in the distant future. Glenn McGee reports that sufficiently humanoid
robots may appear by 2020. Ray Kurzweil sets the date at 2029. However, most
scientists suppose that at least 50 years may have to pass before any sufficiently
advanced system exists.
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The rules for the 2003 Loebner Prize competition explicitly addressed the
question of robot rights:
61. If, in any given year, a publicly available open source Entry entered by the
University of Surrey or the Cambridge Center wins the Silver Medal or the
Gold Medal, then the Medal and the Cash Award will be awarded to the body
responsible for the development of that Entry. If no such body can be identified,
or if there is disagreement among two or more claimants, the Medal and the
Cash Award will be held in trust until such time as the Entry may legally
possess, either in the United States of America or in the venue of the contest,
the Cash Award and Gold Medal in its own right.
Threat to privacy
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle describes the use of speech
recognition technology in the service of tyranny. If an AI program exists that
can understand natural languages and speech (e.g. English), then, with adequate
processing power it could theoretically listen to every phone conversation and
read every email in the world, understand them and report back to the program's
operators exactly what is said and exactly who is saying it. An AI program like
this could allow governments or other entities to efficiently suppress dissent and
attack their enemies.
Threat to human dignity
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Joseph Weizenbaum argued in 1976 that AI technology should not be used to
replace people in positions that require respect and care, such as any of these:
 A customer service representative (AI technology is already used today
for telephone-based interactive voice response systems)
 A therapist (as was seriously proposed by Kenneth Colby in the 1970s)
 A nursemaid for the elderly (as was reported by Pamela McCorduck in
her book The Fifth Generation)
 A soldier
 A judge
 A police officer
Weizenbaum explains that we require authentic feelings of empathy from
people in these positions. If machines replace them, we will find ourselves
alienated, devalued and frustrated. Artificial intelligence, if used in this way,
represents a threat to human dignity. Weizenbaum argues that fact that we are
entertaining the possibility of machines in these positions suggests that we have
experienced an "atrophy of the human spirit that comes from thinking of
ourselves as computers."
Pamela McCorduck counters that, speaking for women and minorities "I'd
rather take my chances with an impartial computer," pointing out that there are
conditions where we would prefer to have automated judges and police that
have no personal agenda at all. AI founder John McCarthy objects to the
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moralizing tone of Weizenbaum's critique. "When moralizing is both vehement
and vague, it invites authoritarian abuse," he writes.
Weaponization of artificial intelligence
Some experts and academics have questioned the use of robots for military
combat, especially when such robots are given some degree of autonomous
functions. The US Navy has funded a report which indicates that as military
robots become more complex, there should be greater attention to implications
of their ability to make autonomous decisions. One researcher states that
autonomous robots might be more humane, as they could make decisions more
effectively. However, other experts question this.
There has been a recent outcry with regards to the engineering of artificialintelligence weapons and has even fostered up ideas of a robot takeover of
mankind. AI weapons do present a type of danger different than that of human
controlled weapons. Many governments have begun to fund programs to
develop AI weaponry. The United States Navy recently announced plans to
develop autonomous drone weapons, paralleling similar announcements by
Russia and Korea respectively. Due to the potential of AI weapons becoming
more dangerous than human operated weapons, Stephen Hawking and Max
Tegmark have signed a Future of Life petition to ban AI weapons. The message
posted by Hawking and Tegmark states that AI weapons pose an immediate
danger and that action is required to avoid catastrophic disasters in the near
future.
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"If any major military power pushes ahead with the AI weapon development, a
global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological
trajectory is obvious:autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikov's of
tomorrow," says the petition, which includes Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn and
MIT professor of linguistics Noam Chomsky as additional supporters against AI
weaponry.
Physicist and Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees warned of catastrophic
instances like "dumb robots going rogue or a network that develops a mind of
its own." Huw Price, a colleague of Rees at Cambridge has voiced a similar
warning that humans may not survive when intelligence "escapes the constraints
of biology." These two professors created the Centre for the Study of Existential
Risk at Cambridge University in the hopes of avoiding this threat to human
existence.
Regarding the potential for smarter-than-human systems to be employed
militarily, the Open Philanthropy Project writes that this scenario "seem
potentially as important as the risks related to loss of control", but that research
organizations investigating AI's long-run social impact have spent relatively
little time on this concern: "this class of scenarios has not been a major focus for
the organizations that have been most active in this space, such as the Machine
Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and the Future of Humanity Institute
(FHI), and there seems to have been less analysis and debate regarding them".
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