Where AI and ethics meet
Given a swell of dire warnings about the future of artificial intelligence over the last few years, the field of AI ethics has become a hive of activity.
These warnings come from a variety of experts such as Oxford University’s Nick Bostrom, but also from more public figures such as Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking. The picture they paint is bleak.
In response, many have dreamed up sets of principles to guide AI researchers and help them negotiate the maze of human morality and ethics. Now, a paper in Nature Machine Intelligence throws a spanner in the works by claiming that such high principles, while laudable, will not give us the ethical AI society we need.
The field of AI ethics is generally broken into two areas: one concerning the ethics guiding humans who develop AIs, and the other machine ethics, guiding the moral behaviour of the AIs or robots themselves. However, the two areas are not so easily separated.
Machine ethics has a long history. In 1950 the great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov clearly articulated his now famous “three laws of robotics” in his work I, Robot, and proposed them as such:
1-A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2-A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3-A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Later a “zeroth” law was added: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
These laws together were Asimov’s (and editor John W Campbell’s) musing on how to ensure an artificially intelligent system would not turn on its creators: a safety feature designed to produce friendly and benevolent robots.
Asimov explored the limits of the three laws in numerous writings, often finding them wanting. While the laws were a literary device, they have nonetheless informed the real-world field of AI ethics.
In 2004, the film adaptation of I, Robot was released, featuring an AI whose interpretation of the three laws led to a plan to dominate human beings in order to save us from ourselves.
To highlight the flaws in the ethical principles of the three laws, an organisation called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (now the Machine Intelligence Research Institute), headed up by the American AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, started an online project called Three Laws Unsafe.
Yudkowsky, an early theorist of the dangers of super-intelligent AI and proponent of the idea of Friendly AI, argued that such principles would be hopelessly simplistic if AI ever developed to the stage depicted in Asimov’s fictions.
Despite widespread recognition of the drawbacks of the three laws, many organisations, from private companies to governments, nonetheless persisted with projects to develop principle-based systems of AI ethics, with one paper listing “84 documents containing ethical principles or guidelines for AI” that have been published to date.
This continued focus on ethical principles is partly because, while the three laws were designed to govern AI behaviour alone, principles of AI ethics apply to AI researchers as well as the intelligences that they develop. The ethical behaviour of AI is, in part, a reflection of the ethical behaviour of those that design and implement them, and because of this, the two areas of AI ethics are inextricably bound to one another.
AI development needs strong moral guidance if we are to avoid some of the more catastrophic scenarios envisaged by AI critics.
