recommended by Paula Boddington
Interview by Nigel Warburton
Advances in artificial intelligence pose a myriad of ethical questions, but the most incisive thinking on this subject says more about humans than it does about machines, says Paula Boddington, Oxford academic and author of Towards a Code of Ethics for Artificial Intelligence.
What do you mean by ethics for artificial intelligence?
Well, that’s a good starting point because there are different sorts of questions that are being asked in the books I’m looking at. One of the kinds of questions we’re asking is: what sorts of ethical issues is artificial intelligence, AI, going to bring? AI encompasses so many different applications that it could raise a really wide variety of different questions.
For instance, what’s going to happen to the workforce if AI makes lots of people redundant? That raises ethical issues because it affects people’s wellbeing and employment. There are also questions about whether we somehow need to build ethics into the sorts of decisions that AI devices are making on our behalf, especially as AI becomes more autonomous and more powerful. For example, one question which is debated a lot at the moment is: what sorts of decisions should be programmed into autonomous vehicles? If they come to a decision where they’re going to have to crash one way or the other, or kill somebody, or kill the driver, what sort of ethics might go into that?
But there are also ethical questions about AI in medicine. For instance, there’s already work developing virtual psychological therapies using AI such as cognitive behavioural therapy. This might be useful since it seems people may sometimes open up more freely online. But, obviously, there are going to be ethical issues in how you’re going to respond to someone saying that they’re going to kill themselves, or something along those lines. There are various ethical issues about how you program that in.
“AI is pushing us to the limits of various questions about what it is to be a human in the world”
I suppose work in AI can be divided into whether you’re talking about the sorts of issues which we’re facing now or in the very near future. The issues we are facing now concern ‘narrow’ AI which is focused on particular tasks. But there is also speculative work about whether we might develop an artificial general intelligence or, even then, going on from that to a superintelligence. But if we’re looking at an artificial general intelligence which would be mimicking human intelligence in general, depending on whether we’re retaining control of it or even if we are not retaining control of it, lots of people are arguing that we need to build in some kind of ethics or some way to make certain that the AI isn’t going to do something like turn back and decide to rebel – the sort of thing that happens in many of the Isaac Asimov robot stories. So there are many ethical questions that arise from AI, both as it is now and as it will be in the future.
But there is also a different range of questions raised by AI because AI is, in many ways, pushing us to the limits of various questions about what it is to be a human in the world. Some of the ethical questions in AI are precisely about how we think of ourselves in the world. To give an example of that, if you can imagine some science fiction future where you’ve got robots doing everything for us, people are also talking about how you can make robots not just to do mundane jobs and some quite complex jobs, but also creative tasks. If you live in a world where the robots are doing all the creative tasks, for instance if you have robots who are writing music that is better than a human could write, or at least as good as a human could write, it just raises fundamental questions of why on earth we are here. Why are all those youngsters in garage bands thrashing out their not tremendously good riffs? Why are they doing that if a robot or a machine could do it better?
Working in this area is really interesting because it pushes us to ask those kinds of questions. Questions like: what is the nature of human agency? How do we relate to other people? How do we even think of ourselves? So, there are lots of deep ethical issues that come up in this area.
What work have you been doing in this area?
In the last two or three years, a number of prominent individuals have voiced concerns about the need to try to ensure that AI develops in ways that are beneficial. The Future of Life Institute, based in the USA, has a programme of grants, funded by Elon Musk and the Open Philanthropy project, given to 35 projects working on different questions related to the issue of developing beneficial AI. I’ve been working on a project examining the groundwork to how we might develop codes of ethics for AI, and what role such codes might have. I’ve got a book on this topic due out soon.
Let’s go on to your first book choice, Heartificial Intelligence: Embracing Our Humanity to Maximize Machines (2016) by John C Havens.
First of all, I’ll say that I’ve chosen five books which I thought, as a package, would give quite a good introduction to the range of issues in AI as there’s a big range of issues and quite a wide range of approaches.
Heartificial Intelligence, my first choice, gives a general overview of the issues which we’re presented with. Havens is a really interesting writer. He was formerly an actor and he’s worked a lot in tech journalism, so he knows a lot about tech. He’s also one of the people who is currently leading the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems. So, he’s really got his finger on the pulse about what the technological developments are and how people are thinking about it in ethics. He wrote this book a couple of years ago, developing it from an article he’d written for Mashable about ethics in AI. There are several things I really like about it, one of them is that it covers a broad range of issues... (continues)
Interview by Nigel Warburton
Advances in artificial intelligence pose a myriad of ethical questions, but the most incisive thinking on this subject says more about humans than it does about machines, says Paula Boddington, Oxford academic and author of Towards a Code of Ethics for Artificial Intelligence.
What do you mean by ethics for artificial intelligence?
Well, that’s a good starting point because there are different sorts of questions that are being asked in the books I’m looking at. One of the kinds of questions we’re asking is: what sorts of ethical issues is artificial intelligence, AI, going to bring? AI encompasses so many different applications that it could raise a really wide variety of different questions.
For instance, what’s going to happen to the workforce if AI makes lots of people redundant? That raises ethical issues because it affects people’s wellbeing and employment. There are also questions about whether we somehow need to build ethics into the sorts of decisions that AI devices are making on our behalf, especially as AI becomes more autonomous and more powerful. For example, one question which is debated a lot at the moment is: what sorts of decisions should be programmed into autonomous vehicles? If they come to a decision where they’re going to have to crash one way or the other, or kill somebody, or kill the driver, what sort of ethics might go into that?
But there are also ethical questions about AI in medicine. For instance, there’s already work developing virtual psychological therapies using AI such as cognitive behavioural therapy. This might be useful since it seems people may sometimes open up more freely online. But, obviously, there are going to be ethical issues in how you’re going to respond to someone saying that they’re going to kill themselves, or something along those lines. There are various ethical issues about how you program that in.
“AI is pushing us to the limits of various questions about what it is to be a human in the world”
I suppose work in AI can be divided into whether you’re talking about the sorts of issues which we’re facing now or in the very near future. The issues we are facing now concern ‘narrow’ AI which is focused on particular tasks. But there is also speculative work about whether we might develop an artificial general intelligence or, even then, going on from that to a superintelligence. But if we’re looking at an artificial general intelligence which would be mimicking human intelligence in general, depending on whether we’re retaining control of it or even if we are not retaining control of it, lots of people are arguing that we need to build in some kind of ethics or some way to make certain that the AI isn’t going to do something like turn back and decide to rebel – the sort of thing that happens in many of the Isaac Asimov robot stories. So there are many ethical questions that arise from AI, both as it is now and as it will be in the future.
But there is also a different range of questions raised by AI because AI is, in many ways, pushing us to the limits of various questions about what it is to be a human in the world. Some of the ethical questions in AI are precisely about how we think of ourselves in the world. To give an example of that, if you can imagine some science fiction future where you’ve got robots doing everything for us, people are also talking about how you can make robots not just to do mundane jobs and some quite complex jobs, but also creative tasks. If you live in a world where the robots are doing all the creative tasks, for instance if you have robots who are writing music that is better than a human could write, or at least as good as a human could write, it just raises fundamental questions of why on earth we are here. Why are all those youngsters in garage bands thrashing out their not tremendously good riffs? Why are they doing that if a robot or a machine could do it better?
Working in this area is really interesting because it pushes us to ask those kinds of questions. Questions like: what is the nature of human agency? How do we relate to other people? How do we even think of ourselves? So, there are lots of deep ethical issues that come up in this area.
What work have you been doing in this area?
In the last two or three years, a number of prominent individuals have voiced concerns about the need to try to ensure that AI develops in ways that are beneficial. The Future of Life Institute, based in the USA, has a programme of grants, funded by Elon Musk and the Open Philanthropy project, given to 35 projects working on different questions related to the issue of developing beneficial AI. I’ve been working on a project examining the groundwork to how we might develop codes of ethics for AI, and what role such codes might have. I’ve got a book on this topic due out soon.
Let’s go on to your first book choice, Heartificial Intelligence: Embracing Our Humanity to Maximize Machines (2016) by John C Havens.
First of all, I’ll say that I’ve chosen five books which I thought, as a package, would give quite a good introduction to the range of issues in AI as there’s a big range of issues and quite a wide range of approaches.
Heartificial Intelligence, my first choice, gives a general overview of the issues which we’re presented with. Havens is a really interesting writer. He was formerly an actor and he’s worked a lot in tech journalism, so he knows a lot about tech. He’s also one of the people who is currently leading the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems. So, he’s really got his finger on the pulse about what the technological developments are and how people are thinking about it in ethics. He wrote this book a couple of years ago, developing it from an article he’d written for Mashable about ethics in AI. There are several things I really like about it, one of them is that it covers a broad range of issues... (continues)
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