Stephen Downes, senior research officer for digital technologies with the National Research Council of Canada, observed, “The problem with the application of ethical principles to artificial intelligence is that there is no common agreement about what those are. 4) Further AI evolution itself raises questions and complications. 2) Humans are the problem: Whose ethics? Who decides? Who cares? Who enforces? 3) Like all tools, AI can be used for good or ill, which makes standards-setting a challenge. It is difficult to define ‘ethical’ AIĪ portion of these experts infused their answers with questions that amount to this overarching question: How can ethical standards be defined and applied for a global, cross-cultural, ever-evolving, ever-expanding universe of diverse black-box systems in which bad actors and misinformation thrive?Ī selection of respondents’ comments on this broad topic is organized over the next 20 pages under these subheadings: 1) It can be hard to agree as to what constitutes ethical behavior. They say diagnosing and unwinding the pre-existing problems may be difficult if not impossible to achieve. That means the biases and ethically troubling aspects of current systems are being designed into the new systems. How can harmful AI “outcomes” be diagnosed and addressed if the basis for AI “decisions” cannot be discerned? Some of these experts also note that existing AI systems and databases are often used to build new AI applications. Some respondents noted that, even if workable ethics requirements might be established, they could not be applied or governed because most AI design is proprietary, hidden and complex. A share of these experts said creators of AI tools work in groups that have little or no incentive to design systems that address ethical concerns. They asked: Whose ethical systems should be applied? Who gets to make that decision? Who has responsibility to care about implementing ethical AI? Who might enforce ethical regimes once they are established? How?Ī large number of respondents argued that geopolitical and economic competition are the main drivers for AI developers, while moral concerns take a back seat. The experts who expressed worries also invoked governance concerns. Additionally, good and bad actors exploit loopholes and gray areas where ethical rules aren’t crisp, so workarounds, patches or other remedies are often created with varying levels of success. Few people have much education or training in ethics. Social standards and norms evolve and can become wholly different as cultures change. The nature and relative power of the actors in any given scenario also matter. Any attempt to fashion ethical rules generates countless varying scenarios in which applications of those rules can be messy. They said context matters when it comes to ethical considerations. A share of the experts responding noted that ethics are hard to define, implement and enforce. It would be quite difficult – some might say impossible – to design broadly adopted ethical AI systems.
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