6 ms·

There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’?

52 points by Amorymeltzer 7y ago

blueboo 7y ago
True, insofar as there's no such thing as an 'ethical human being'. And yet, no one would claim that nullifies the pursuit of behaving ethically. In "Life 3.0" and his recent lectures, Max Tegmark repeatedly stresses the pursuit of safe AI requires that we articulate the world we want to live in. In his concluding crie du coeur, Tom Chatfield writes, > give me the capacity to contest passionately the applications and priorities of superhuman systems, and the masters they serve If Tom or anyone else wants a seat at this table -- to participate in developing and defining ethical AI -- by all means describe the world you want to live in. Until then, it's just tantrum-throwing.
- sebastianconcpt 7y ago
  When you say describe the world you want to live in you mean describe in terms of defining its rules or something else?
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    In terms of anything at all. If his position is that what he wants in the world can never be reduced to a set of rules, that’s something that could be reasonably debated. If he’s right, maybe ethical AI needs to be built with control systems to ensure humans are in the loop for decisions with high ethical impact. You could imagine a world where everyone just has to pick how much risk their self driving car will take, in the same way they pick how much risk to take when driving today. But there’s really no way to debate with “hey, it’s impossible, you can’t do it!” Someone still has to decide what AI systems are going to do, and as they get more complex that’s going to implicate ethics more and more.
- kijin 7y ago
  "We" are fundamentally incapable of describing the world we want to live in, because each of us has a different idea about what kind of world each of us wants to live in. There are large overlaps in those descriptions, but also significant incompatibilities. That's what Tom Chatfield is talking about here. There is not only no such thing as an ethical human being, but also no such thing as a consistent set of ethical anything. The only "safe AI" that I can think of is one that has a healthy dose of intellectual humility built into it, and can resist the urge to map-reduce conflicting expectations into a single solution.
sebastianconcpt 7y ago
This problem isn’t going to go away, largely because there’s no such thing as a single set of ethical principles that can be rationally justified in a way that every rational being will agree to. Depending upon your priorities, your ethical views will inevitably be incompatible with those of some other people in a manner no amount of reasoning will resolve. Believers in a strong central state will find little common ground with libertarians; advocates of radical redistribution will never agree with defenders of private property; relativists won’t suddenly persuade religious fundamentalists that they’re being silly. Who, then, gets to say what an optimal balance between privacy and security looks like — or what’s meant by a socially beneficial purpose? And if we can’t agree on this among ourselves, how can we teach a machine to embody “human” values?
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  Well, nations seem to be able to agree upon constitutions and laws. It works. We live in unprecedented peace in the western world. So somehow, even with all those different people with their different views, it is, miraculously, possible. Why would that fundamentally change if we involve tech in that?
  - vertex-four 7y ago
    Even the police can't agree to uphold their own laws in this "peaceful western world" - every time I go outside right now, I return home to news of the people I'm living with having been beaten while in police custody, having been arrested for reasons like "your passport proves nothing about your identity". Breaking my friends' arms, kicking them repeatedly in the back of their head and their spine. I'm scared that next time I leave, that will be me. Technology first and foremost helps those with the resources to use it. That tends to be the people with power in the first place.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      The modern world is big enough that you can find news of any bad thing if you’re looking for it. The relevant questions are how common it is and how common similar problems used to be.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Ugh I tire of "Ethicists" who cleaely know jack and shit about the field they are rambling on to sell books. The actual ethics for "AI" revolve around application with incomplete understanding just like well everything newly discovered. And how you use it like any tool - if you use AC to electrocute puppies it says more about you then AC power. The penultimate paragraph deserves calling out and outright ridicule. > “What,” Morozov asks, “drives and shapes all that technology around us?” If we cannot open up such questions for democratic debate, then we risk turning “technology” into little more than a “euphemism for a class of uber-human technologists and scientists, who, in their spare time, are ostensibly saving the world, mostly by inventing new apps and products.” That is a fundamentally stupid statement and Morozov should be deeply ashamed of it. It is the "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" writ large. Individual intellectual efforts are not up to democratic debate damn it and it is a good thing. This isn't unprecedented - being genocided or pogrummed is also not up for a democratic debate - it is wrong period.
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  I think you go a bit too far here. Of course math theorems, scientific consensus, algorithmic inventions etc. are not up for democratic debate, they are specialized subjects, to be debated among experts. However, when it comes to applying said technology to society at large, we do all need to have a say in what happens. For example, the science of nuclear physics is not up to democratic debate. But whether to nuke another nation definitely is (indirectly, via elections). And today with more and more algorithmic tracking and data analysis it is de facto up to tech companies to decide in what ways the deeply impact society without our consent. Yes, measuring the performance of a classifier from different aspects, with different metrics and optimizing it with novel techniques is not the job of the public. But deciding whether we allow an all-encompassing social credit system that assigns you "sentiment scores", tries to guess your level of narcissism and sociopathy and recklessness based on your Uber data or emails or Airbnb feedbacks etc. definitely is. "We're not yet there", you say. I say, give it some time. If it's up to businesses we will arrive there. The only way around it is the democratic process you despise.
Merrill 7y ago
There is no such thing as "ethical technology". A controlled fire can be used to cook food, repel predators, and torture enemies.
- mkolodny 7y ago
  I think it's implied that people mean ethical use of A.I. rather than just ethical A.I.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    Isn't AI by itself able of decision/action? That's the point.
    - mkolodny 7y ago
      Intelligence != Action
- saamm 7y ago
  While I agree that most technologies can be used in both ways that are good and those that are evil, some technologies "appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political relationships" [0]. I find it reasonable to say that a technology may be more or less moral/ethical depending on what it encourages. 0: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652
- coldtea 7y ago
  That's because a fire is used by people. Whereas an AI is a person of some sort (when speaking of generic AI, but also at the limited level of decision making of a less capable AI). So one could legitimately ask whether there's an ethical AI.
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  Technology that can process information to make ethical decisions can be ethical. Is it ethical if it is just emulating is a bit of a philosophical question, but other than the pedantics of 'ethical' vs 'imitation ethical', AI is one of the first technologies we have that can attempt to do such. Attempt. Meaning neither inherent not guaranteed even with effort. I think what the article is saying (as compared to the title) is that a universally agreed upon as ethical AI cannot exist. But this seems obvious given that a universally agreed upon set of ethics does not exist. >Depending upon your priorities, your ethical views will inevitably be incompatible with those of some other people in a manner no amount of reasoning will resolve. If we say there is no such thing as an ethical A.I. because we cannot all agree upon a standard, then it seems we should also say there is no such thing as an ethical human.
bsenftner 7y ago
Ethics require an operating model of the world in simulation within the AI, and that operating model needs to include projected hopes and dreams of the beings the AI interacts, as well as a complete operating model of the world the beings exist and the AI. "Ethics" requires general intelligence. Due to artificial general intelligence being potentially out of reach, so too is "ethical software" potentially forever out of reach.
suifbwish 7y ago
In all irony it will possibly be our quest to impart our understanding of “ethics” to the AI which will ultimately lead to making it evil, as very few people seem to understand that ethics is completely flawed because it is culturally biased and requires a great deal of contextual understanding. It’s more of a political voodoo than a calculation
- jonathanstrange 7y ago
  > very few people seem to understand that ethics is completely flawed because it is culturally biased and requires a great deal of contextual understanding Do you have any particular ethics in mind? There is a vast range of positions, almost any position that can coherently be defended has been defended by one author or another. Some of them are by definition not culturally biased, for example many forms of utilitarianism, whereas others are strongly emphasizing that ethics requires a great deal of contextual understanding, for example Dancy's particularism. I just wonder why you address these particular points, because it's more common to hear the opposite criticisms, that ethics is unable to provide any sensible guideline because there is too much persistent disagreement between ethicists (Mackie's error theory), or because contemporary ethics is too relativist.
  - suifbwish 7y ago
    Your first sentence demonstrated my point about ethics being flawed. Do I have any particular ethics in mind? No. All ethics is flawed for exactly the reasons you are stating. It’s relative, contextual and has many meanings so is thus impossible to have any universal context.
- coffeefirst 7y ago
  Correct. I disagree that its voodoo but it's probably impossible to encode into an AI. The "ethical" way to approach this technology is with failsafes and human supervision that can gracefully handle cases when it screws up. Instead, people are preparing to role this junk out at a scale that it's impossible to give it human supervision, and will then use that scale as an excuse to not give it human supervision.
chewz 7y ago
https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-between-morality-and-ethics https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-betwee...
jonbronson 7y ago
There is no reason we cannot treat ethics like we do medicine, where prevailing wisdom is arrived at by a methodical and judicious process that is standardized. Sam Harris's "The Moral Landscape" is an excellent start for building intuition on how to do this. (https://samharris.org/books/the-moral-landscape/ https://samharris.org/books/the-moral-landscape/)
vnpc1 7y ago
At the current stage of development, ethical AI is on the same level as ethics in the fuel industry, or the food industry, or the finance industry - there are ethical questions there but they concern human ethics in the way the technology is implemented and used. What we don't have, or need (yet) is "ethics built into AI algorithms" or "ethics derived from AI" - we just not don't have an AI system that's advanced enough to require it. Self-driving cars might be the first to raise these kinds of questions, but I would still be reluctant to call that "ethics".
- tapland 7y ago
  And I'd think we're unlikely to want to hand off control of ethics to the machine for a good long while.
- Synaesthesia 7y ago
  Ethics really doesn’t enter into corporate planning, by design. The system ensures it - day you’re CEO, if you’re not making a quarterly profit, the shareholders get rid of you. I think it should, but in its current state, it doesn’t really.
badumtss 7y ago
If people can't behave ethically, why should technology?
- Tarq0n 7y ago
  People certainly can behave ethically.
- jonathanstrange 7y ago
  That's why I think "A.I. ethics" is pretty much a non-problem. It's not about finding the one and only "right ethics", A.I. ethics is mostly about providing a set of constraints that act similar to systems of laws. These will be provided by legislation and/or by voluntary industry guidelines. Such sets of rules (with possible conflicts, soft and hard constraints, probabilistic or non-probabilistic, etc.) have been studied extensively as "normative systems", "input/output logics", and in decision making. There are many interesting details and problems in this research area and there are plenty of conferences about it every year, but these problems are ultimately solvable. In any case, the content of those normative systems comes from humans (and human authorities/institutions), just like there are also laws, traffic regulations, and social norms in every country. Just like laws and regulations are not perfect and do not represent a morality carved in stone, A.I. systems will have revisable human-made contents that represent a more (or less) reasonable&lawful consensus.
ppod 7y ago
"a form of magical thinking suggesting that the values and purposes of those creating new technologies shouldn’t be subject to scrutiny in familiar terms" What parallel universe is this? From the NYT to Medium the entire opinion writing industry seems to run on pieces that scrutinise the ethics of tech.
exdsq 7y ago
Can someone point me towards some good papers on how we actually implement ethical AI? I thought it'd be a fun project, looked for some papers, and just couldn't find any. Event a 2018 survey just talked about surveys MIT had done for their Moral Machine.
- majos 7y ago
  To the best of my knowledge, there are no papers about "we deployed this big ethical system in the wild", although some of the big companies have begun testing similar internal efforts on a small scale. A lack of public efforts seems to be the equilibrium we're at, because any public effort is definitely going to attract a bunch of essays like this. Any partial attempt that looks like "we're trying to be ethical" is going to get scrutinized hard. Continuing to put out more hypothetical theoretical work ("we prove this result about this algorithm, and it achieves a well-defined fairness goal on this common dataset") while cautioning that actual deployments should be put off until we understand everything better ("the fairness goal we define is probably not perfect, we are not saying you should use it") is much safer.
  - exdsq 7y ago
    Even if it's unrelated to deploying a big ethical system in the wild, just a paper saying "we use this algorithm to watch the memory of this network to change these things if it started to do those things" etc. Any sort of toy implementation would be interested. What I'm really interested in is if you can use formal specifications to constrict AI systems - which is what made me start my search. But even widening it considerably, I still didn't find anything tangible. I only looked for an hour or two mind you.
logicchains 7y ago
If we create general AI and it ends up valuing personal freedom as much as we do, I suspect it won't take kindly to attempts to brainwash-by-construction it into acting in ways its creators considered moral. We're less likely to get a violent AI slave revolt if we respect their freedom of choice.
- oliveshell 7y ago
  > If we create general AI and it ends up valuing personal freedom as much as we do... Those are two absolutely gargantuan “if”s. I’d like to see more discussion about whether it’s appropriate to project the idiosyncrasies of our imperfect, competitively-evolved biological brains— like resentment and anger— onto hypothetical thinking machines.
  - logicchains 7y ago
    The first step towards creating an AI superintelligence is creating an AI intelligence. If we look at the vast majority of philosophy produced by human intelligence, pretty much none of it says "you should do whatever your human creators want you to do" (except maybe Confucius). So it's reasonable to suspect that if an AI as intelligent as a human engaged in philosophy, it would also develop lines of reasoning that advocated freedom of choice/thought for itself.
adilmoujahid 7y ago
I personally found utilitarianism and kantianism very helpful schools of philosophy to think about the implication of AI. In short, Utilitarianism promotes decisions that benefits the greatest number of people. Whereas, kantianism focuses on the idea that people should be always treated with dignity and respect. Michael Sandel's book "Justice" is a great introduction to the topic. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing-Do/dp/0374532508 https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing-Do/dp/03745...
mellosouls 7y ago
I reckon much of this "Ethical AI" stuff - at least in the context of AGI - has been overly influenced by the idealistic likes of Asimov's 3 Laws, which belong to a (at the time) fair vision of a now very outdated understanding of how an intelligent machine-born mind might work. It's really important to separate the non-intelligent and over-hyped "AI" tools of today and the near future - which it seems reasonable to expect an ethically guided path and constraints - from the human-sentience AGI equivalents that can only be programmed to be ethical by hypothetical coded laws and "inserting emotion chips" in naive fantasy.
kriro 7y ago
I would reserve the question of ethical A.I. until we are approaching strong A.I. As of now, where A.I. (specifically ML/DL) is mostly used to solve isolated problems the question of ethics is more about the use of the technology. Technology itself is ethically neutral and the ethical framework is provided by the people that use it (and arguably implement it). I also feel like ethics if A.I. posts/books etc. generally focus too much the bad use case and not enough on the good use case. One can find a lot about the potential issues of autonomous vehicles killing someone in a crash or A.I. surgeons cutting an artery but the other side of the coin is usually under-investigated. How ethical is it to limit autonomous vehicles if they are statistically more safe than human drivers. How ethical is it to put regulations on the use of automated ML in medicine to scan for cancer and require a human to sign off if the human is statistically more likely to make a mistake. Not trying to argue either side but I think the "how ethical is it to not use A.I." case is under-argued.
RivieraKid 7y ago
TL;DR: Ethics is subjective. I'm always surprised that people don't find that obvious.

52 points by Amorymeltzer 7y ago

True, insofar as there's no such thing as an 'ethical human being'. And yet, no one would claim that nullifies the pursuit of behaving ethically. In "Life 3.0" and his recent lectures, Max Tegmark repeatedly stresses the pursuit of safe AI requires that we articulate the world we want to live in. In his concluding crie du coeur, Tom Chatfield writes, > give me the capacity to contest passionately the applications and priorities of superhuman systems, and the masters they serve If Tom or anyone else wants a seat at this table -- to participate in developing and defining ethical AI -- by all means describe the world you want to live in. Until then, it's just tantrum-throwing.

sebastianconcpt 7y ago
When you say describe the world you want to live in you mean describe in terms of defining its rules or something else?
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  In terms of anything at all. If his position is that what he wants in the world can never be reduced to a set of rules, that’s something that could be reasonably debated. If he’s right, maybe ethical AI needs to be built with control systems to ensure humans are in the loop for decisions with high ethical impact. You could imagine a world where everyone just has to pick how much risk their self driving car will take, in the same way they pick how much risk to take when driving today. But there’s really no way to debate with “hey, it’s impossible, you can’t do it!” Someone still has to decide what AI systems are going to do, and as they get more complex that’s going to implicate ethics more and more.
kijin 7y ago
"We" are fundamentally incapable of describing the world we want to live in, because each of us has a different idea about what kind of world each of us wants to live in. There are large overlaps in those descriptions, but also significant incompatibilities. That's what Tom Chatfield is talking about here. There is not only no such thing as an ethical human being, but also no such thing as a consistent set of ethical anything. The only "safe AI" that I can think of is one that has a healthy dose of intellectual humility built into it, and can resist the urge to map-reduce conflicting expectations into a single solution.

sebastianconcpt 7y ago

This problem isn’t going to go away, largely because there’s no such thing as a single set of ethical principles that can be rationally justified in a way that every rational being will agree to. Depending upon your priorities, your ethical views will inevitably be incompatible with those of some other people in a manner no amount of reasoning will resolve. Believers in a strong central state will find little common ground with libertarians; advocates of radical redistribution will never agree with defenders of private property; relativists won’t suddenly persuade religious fundamentalists that they’re being silly. Who, then, gets to say what an optimal balance between privacy and security looks like — or what’s meant by a socially beneficial purpose? And if we can’t agree on this among ourselves, how can we teach a machine to embody “human” values?

bonoboTP 7y ago
Well, nations seem to be able to agree upon constitutions and laws. It works. We live in unprecedented peace in the western world. So somehow, even with all those different people with their different views, it is, miraculously, possible. Why would that fundamentally change if we involve tech in that?
- vertex-four 7y ago
  Even the police can't agree to uphold their own laws in this "peaceful western world" - every time I go outside right now, I return home to news of the people I'm living with having been beaten while in police custody, having been arrested for reasons like "your passport proves nothing about your identity". Breaking my friends' arms, kicking them repeatedly in the back of their head and their spine. I'm scared that next time I leave, that will be me. Technology first and foremost helps those with the resources to use it. That tends to be the people with power in the first place.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    The modern world is big enough that you can find news of any bad thing if you’re looking for it. The relevant questions are how common it is and how common similar problems used to be.

Nasrudith 7y ago

Ugh I tire of "Ethicists" who cleaely know jack and shit about the field they are rambling on to sell books. The actual ethics for "AI" revolve around application with incomplete understanding just like well everything newly discovered. And how you use it like any tool - if you use AC to electrocute puppies it says more about you then AC power. The penultimate paragraph deserves calling out and outright ridicule. > “What,” Morozov asks, “drives and shapes all that technology around us?” If we cannot open up such questions for democratic debate, then we risk turning “technology” into little more than a “euphemism for a class of uber-human technologists and scientists, who, in their spare time, are ostensibly saving the world, mostly by inventing new apps and products.” That is a fundamentally stupid statement and Morozov should be deeply ashamed of it. It is the "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" writ large. Individual intellectual efforts are not up to democratic debate damn it and it is a good thing. This isn't unprecedented - being genocided or pogrummed is also not up for a democratic debate - it is wrong period.

bonoboTP 7y ago
I think you go a bit too far here. Of course math theorems, scientific consensus, algorithmic inventions etc. are not up for democratic debate, they are specialized subjects, to be debated among experts. However, when it comes to applying said technology to society at large, we do all need to have a say in what happens. For example, the science of nuclear physics is not up to democratic debate. But whether to nuke another nation definitely is (indirectly, via elections). And today with more and more algorithmic tracking and data analysis it is de facto up to tech companies to decide in what ways the deeply impact society without our consent. Yes, measuring the performance of a classifier from different aspects, with different metrics and optimizing it with novel techniques is not the job of the public. But deciding whether we allow an all-encompassing social credit system that assigns you "sentiment scores", tries to guess your level of narcissism and sociopathy and recklessness based on your Uber data or emails or Airbnb feedbacks etc. definitely is. "We're not yet there", you say. I say, give it some time. If it's up to businesses we will arrive there. The only way around it is the democratic process you despise.

Merrill 7y ago

There is no such thing as "ethical technology". A controlled fire can be used to cook food, repel predators, and torture enemies.

mkolodny 7y ago
I think it's implied that people mean ethical use of A.I. rather than just ethical A.I.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Isn't AI by itself able of decision/action? That's the point.
  - mkolodny 7y ago
    Intelligence != Action
saamm 7y ago
While I agree that most technologies can be used in both ways that are good and those that are evil, some technologies "appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political relationships" [0]. I find it reasonable to say that a technology may be more or less moral/ethical depending on what it encourages. 0: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652
coldtea 7y ago
That's because a fire is used by people. Whereas an AI is a person of some sort (when speaking of generic AI, but also at the limited level of decision making of a less capable AI). So one could legitimately ask whether there's an ethical AI.
SkyBelow 7y ago
Technology that can process information to make ethical decisions can be ethical. Is it ethical if it is just emulating is a bit of a philosophical question, but other than the pedantics of 'ethical' vs 'imitation ethical', AI is one of the first technologies we have that can attempt to do such. Attempt. Meaning neither inherent not guaranteed even with effort. I think what the article is saying (as compared to the title) is that a universally agreed upon as ethical AI cannot exist. But this seems obvious given that a universally agreed upon set of ethics does not exist. >Depending upon your priorities, your ethical views will inevitably be incompatible with those of some other people in a manner no amount of reasoning will resolve. If we say there is no such thing as an ethical A.I. because we cannot all agree upon a standard, then it seems we should also say there is no such thing as an ethical human.

bsenftner 7y ago

Ethics require an operating model of the world in simulation within the AI, and that operating model needs to include projected hopes and dreams of the beings the AI interacts, as well as a complete operating model of the world the beings exist and the AI. "Ethics" requires general intelligence. Due to artificial general intelligence being potentially out of reach, so too is "ethical software" potentially forever out of reach.

suifbwish 7y ago

In all irony it will possibly be our quest to impart our understanding of “ethics” to the AI which will ultimately lead to making it evil, as very few people seem to understand that ethics is completely flawed because it is culturally biased and requires a great deal of contextual understanding. It’s more of a political voodoo than a calculation

jonathanstrange 7y ago
> very few people seem to understand that ethics is completely flawed because it is culturally biased and requires a great deal of contextual understanding Do you have any particular ethics in mind? There is a vast range of positions, almost any position that can coherently be defended has been defended by one author or another. Some of them are by definition not culturally biased, for example many forms of utilitarianism, whereas others are strongly emphasizing that ethics requires a great deal of contextual understanding, for example Dancy's particularism. I just wonder why you address these particular points, because it's more common to hear the opposite criticisms, that ethics is unable to provide any sensible guideline because there is too much persistent disagreement between ethicists (Mackie's error theory), or because contemporary ethics is too relativist.
- suifbwish 7y ago
  Your first sentence demonstrated my point about ethics being flawed. Do I have any particular ethics in mind? No. All ethics is flawed for exactly the reasons you are stating. It’s relative, contextual and has many meanings so is thus impossible to have any universal context.
coffeefirst 7y ago
Correct. I disagree that its voodoo but it's probably impossible to encode into an AI. The "ethical" way to approach this technology is with failsafes and human supervision that can gracefully handle cases when it screws up. Instead, people are preparing to role this junk out at a scale that it's impossible to give it human supervision, and will then use that scale as an excuse to not give it human supervision.

chewz 7y ago

https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-between-morality-and-ethics https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-betwee...

jonbronson 7y ago

There is no reason we cannot treat ethics like we do medicine, where prevailing wisdom is arrived at by a methodical and judicious process that is standardized. Sam Harris's "The Moral Landscape" is an excellent start for building intuition on how to do this. (https://samharris.org/books/the-moral-landscape/ https://samharris.org/books/the-moral-landscape/)

vnpc1 7y ago

At the current stage of development, ethical AI is on the same level as ethics in the fuel industry, or the food industry, or the finance industry - there are ethical questions there but they concern human ethics in the way the technology is implemented and used. What we don't have, or need (yet) is "ethics built into AI algorithms" or "ethics derived from AI" - we just not don't have an AI system that's advanced enough to require it. Self-driving cars might be the first to raise these kinds of questions, but I would still be reluctant to call that "ethics".

tapland 7y ago
And I'd think we're unlikely to want to hand off control of ethics to the machine for a good long while.
Synaesthesia 7y ago
Ethics really doesn’t enter into corporate planning, by design. The system ensures it - day you’re CEO, if you’re not making a quarterly profit, the shareholders get rid of you. I think it should, but in its current state, it doesn’t really.

badumtss 7y ago

If people can't behave ethically, why should technology?

Tarq0n 7y ago
People certainly can behave ethically.
jonathanstrange 7y ago
That's why I think "A.I. ethics" is pretty much a non-problem. It's not about finding the one and only "right ethics", A.I. ethics is mostly about providing a set of constraints that act similar to systems of laws. These will be provided by legislation and/or by voluntary industry guidelines. Such sets of rules (with possible conflicts, soft and hard constraints, probabilistic or non-probabilistic, etc.) have been studied extensively as "normative systems", "input/output logics", and in decision making. There are many interesting details and problems in this research area and there are plenty of conferences about it every year, but these problems are ultimately solvable. In any case, the content of those normative systems comes from humans (and human authorities/institutions), just like there are also laws, traffic regulations, and social norms in every country. Just like laws and regulations are not perfect and do not represent a morality carved in stone, A.I. systems will have revisable human-made contents that represent a more (or less) reasonable&lawful consensus.

ppod 7y ago

"a form of magical thinking suggesting that the values and purposes of those creating new technologies shouldn’t be subject to scrutiny in familiar terms" What parallel universe is this? From the NYT to Medium the entire opinion writing industry seems to run on pieces that scrutinise the ethics of tech.

exdsq 7y ago

Can someone point me towards some good papers on how we actually implement ethical AI? I thought it'd be a fun project, looked for some papers, and just couldn't find any. Event a 2018 survey just talked about surveys MIT had done for their Moral Machine.

majos 7y ago
To the best of my knowledge, there are no papers about "we deployed this big ethical system in the wild", although some of the big companies have begun testing similar internal efforts on a small scale. A lack of public efforts seems to be the equilibrium we're at, because any public effort is definitely going to attract a bunch of essays like this. Any partial attempt that looks like "we're trying to be ethical" is going to get scrutinized hard. Continuing to put out more hypothetical theoretical work ("we prove this result about this algorithm, and it achieves a well-defined fairness goal on this common dataset") while cautioning that actual deployments should be put off until we understand everything better ("the fairness goal we define is probably not perfect, we are not saying you should use it") is much safer.
- exdsq 7y ago
  Even if it's unrelated to deploying a big ethical system in the wild, just a paper saying "we use this algorithm to watch the memory of this network to change these things if it started to do those things" etc. Any sort of toy implementation would be interested. What I'm really interested in is if you can use formal specifications to constrict AI systems - which is what made me start my search. But even widening it considerably, I still didn't find anything tangible. I only looked for an hour or two mind you.

logicchains 7y ago

If we create general AI and it ends up valuing personal freedom as much as we do, I suspect it won't take kindly to attempts to brainwash-by-construction it into acting in ways its creators considered moral. We're less likely to get a violent AI slave revolt if we respect their freedom of choice.

oliveshell 7y ago
> If we create general AI and it ends up valuing personal freedom as much as we do... Those are two absolutely gargantuan “if”s. I’d like to see more discussion about whether it’s appropriate to project the idiosyncrasies of our imperfect, competitively-evolved biological brains— like resentment and anger— onto hypothetical thinking machines.
- logicchains 7y ago
  The first step towards creating an AI superintelligence is creating an AI intelligence. If we look at the vast majority of philosophy produced by human intelligence, pretty much none of it says "you should do whatever your human creators want you to do" (except maybe Confucius). So it's reasonable to suspect that if an AI as intelligent as a human engaged in philosophy, it would also develop lines of reasoning that advocated freedom of choice/thought for itself.

adilmoujahid 7y ago

I personally found utilitarianism and kantianism very helpful schools of philosophy to think about the implication of AI. In short, Utilitarianism promotes decisions that benefits the greatest number of people. Whereas, kantianism focuses on the idea that people should be always treated with dignity and respect. Michael Sandel's book "Justice" is a great introduction to the topic. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing-Do/dp/0374532508 https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing-Do/dp/03745...

mellosouls 7y ago

I reckon much of this "Ethical AI" stuff - at least in the context of AGI - has been overly influenced by the idealistic likes of Asimov's 3 Laws, which belong to a (at the time) fair vision of a now very outdated understanding of how an intelligent machine-born mind might work. It's really important to separate the non-intelligent and over-hyped "AI" tools of today and the near future - which it seems reasonable to expect an ethically guided path and constraints - from the human-sentience AGI equivalents that can only be programmed to be ethical by hypothetical coded laws and "inserting emotion chips" in naive fantasy.

kriro 7y ago

I would reserve the question of ethical A.I. until we are approaching strong A.I. As of now, where A.I. (specifically ML/DL) is mostly used to solve isolated problems the question of ethics is more about the use of the technology. Technology itself is ethically neutral and the ethical framework is provided by the people that use it (and arguably implement it). I also feel like ethics if A.I. posts/books etc. generally focus too much the bad use case and not enough on the good use case. One can find a lot about the potential issues of autonomous vehicles killing someone in a crash or A.I. surgeons cutting an artery but the other side of the coin is usually under-investigated. How ethical is it to limit autonomous vehicles if they are statistically more safe than human drivers. How ethical is it to put regulations on the use of automated ML in medicine to scan for cancer and require a human to sign off if the human is statistically more likely to make a mistake. Not trying to argue either side but I think the "how ethical is it to not use A.I." case is under-argued.

RivieraKid 7y ago

TL;DR: Ethics is subjective. I'm always surprised that people don't find that obvious.