The challenge of incorporating ethics into AI systems lies in defining boundaries for machine responsibility without granting them full moral agency.
Developing communities of cooperation with artificial agents can improve problem-solving and decision-making, but humans must not relinquish their responsibility to machines.
Deep dives
AI and Ethics: The Challenge of Building Ethics into Machines
Humans are creating artificial intelligence machines that are already making important decisions in our lives. The challenge is to build ethics into these machines. AI systems that learn are the most relevant kind of intelligence. Unlike older AI methods that relied on logical processing and human programming, learning machines have the potential to advance our understanding and decision-making processes. For instance, AlphaGo, a learning AI system, was able to discover new strategies and defeat a world champion in the game of Go. However, giving machines responsibilities raises questions about holding them accountable and ensuring moral decision-making. While machines can have responsibilities, they lack self-reflection, consciousness, and moral emotions that are crucial for full moral agency. Nonetheless, societies must seriously consider the ethical implications and determine how machines can respond to morally relevant features of situations.
Issues of Responsibility and Limitations with AI Systems
When it comes to granting machines autonomy in decision-making, it is essential to define boundaries. Machines can have responsibilities, but this does not imply that they are moral agents. Responsibility in machines should be limited to certain decisions entrusted to them, and they should not be seen as having full moral agency. However, not all responsibilities can be explicitly programmed into machines. They can make mistakes that are not just technical, but ethical. For example, a machine performing a heart operation may excel in cutting and monitoring vital signals but might not detect certain signs that something is wrong with the patient. The challenge lies in deciding which mistakes are permissible and what ethical limitations should be built into machines.
AI as Co-operating Agents and the Role of Moral Intuition
One possibility with AI is to develop communities of cooperation with artificial agents. For example, autonomous vehicles present coordination and communication problems that can be improved through machine learning. As AI agents access information and simulate problem-solving strategies, they acquire situational responsiveness and can potentially develop ethical intuition. While they lack human consciousness and moral emotions, they can model human intuitions and implicit ethical theories based on dataset analysis. However, relying solely on AI for moral decision-making poses risks, as it could lead to the atrophy of human capacity for making judgments on the fly. Humans must continue to actively participate in the decision-making process and not relinquish their responsibility to machines.
Developments in AI are coming very quickly. But it's not easy to work out how to deal with the ethical questions that AI generates. Peter Railton discusses AI and Ethics with Nigel Warburton for this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast
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