Welcome to Neurals beginners guide to AI.
The discourse surrounding artificial intelligence ethics is wide, varied, and completely out of control.
Worse, the media tends to muddy up the issue byconflating artificial intelligence ethics with speculative science fiction.
Should we worry about sentient AI rising up and killing us all?
But is it an ethical issue?
Well come back to this question.
We use common sense.
AI ethics are a sticky wicket because they comprise a two-fold scenario.
Primarily, ethics refer to a single ideal: human behavior.
But in the case of AI, we must also consider the behavior of the machine.
Traditional automobiles, for example, dont have the ability to make decisions that could harm humans.
But your 2021 Tesla with so-called Full Self Driving enabled can.
However, the Tesla isnt making a decision based on its personal ethics, morals, or values.
Its doing what it was programmed to do.
These arent the ethics youre looking for
It doesnt matter.
This isnt an AI ethics question even if the trolley is autonomous and the operator is a neural internet.
Its just a moral conundrum.
Questions of such esoteric nature are usually meant to distract from the real situation.
This isnt an ethical problem concerning the development of AI.
Its an ethical issue concerning thedeploymentof AI.
Is it ethical to test a product on city streets that could potentially kill people?
Its the same with discussions surrounding bias.
We need to push the boundaries of technology for advance as a civilization.
But, is it ethical to keep a system in production after its been found to contain harmful bias?
Approximately 95,000 people suffered harm from the US governments ethical decisions concerning that tainted water.
When it comes to AI, the government and big tech are even more feckless and disingenuous.
Google, for example, is one of the richest companies in the history of the world.
Yet,its algorithms manifest bias in ways that demonstrate racism and bigotry.
According to Google, it isnt a racist company.
So why would it continue to develop and deploy algorithms it knows to be racist?
Search works fine for most people.
We dont talk about AI ethics in terms of the harms weve chosen to tacitly endorse.
The discussion tends to surround the unknowable what should we do about sentient AGI?
But today we may as well be having a discussion on land rights in the Andromeda Galaxy.
Theres no current indication that were within a millennia or even a century of AI sentience.
We do, however, have thousands of companies around the world usingracist AI systems to judge job candidates.
Weve got law enforcement agencies using harmful,biased facial recognitionandpredictive policing systemstowrongfully arrest,judge, andsentence people.
And social media companies deploy AI at scale massive enough toeffect global public perception.
Modern use of AI is dangerous and unregulated.
But theres almost nothing stopping anyone from developing an AI system capable of causing sweeping injurious harm.
