Updated June 21, 2023
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence Ethics
The following article provides an outline for Artificial Intelligence Ethics. In today’s scenario, we are looking at AI as a way to ease things and bring comfort into our lives through recommendation systems, logistic optimization, fraud detection, automation, etc. But it comes with specific challenges like unemployment, AI behavior towards human beings and vice versa, AI glitches and stupidity, Security, and robot rights.
We are Advancing rapidly daily, so it is hard for the law to keep up with AI. And for proper sustainability for all creatures, it is super important to have limits defined. We know AI systems are superficial, and dealing with them is not simple, But introducing AI Ethics would give the right direction to the future AI world.
What is Artificial Intelligence Ethics?
Ethics generally refers to a person’s moral behavior in conducting different life activities. In the same way, Ethics in Artificial Intelligence refers to the activities of AI systems and robots. AI-based soft-wares surround our lives, e.g., Google’s search engine, Alexa’s different recommendations on Youtube and Netflix, self-driving cars, and facial recognition systems.
It raises concerns over how these algorithms provide a recommendation or how credit limits are defined for different customers. For some algorithms, it is easy to understand the flow, but for deep learning algorithms, we cannot explain how they are understood. We now have ever-evolving algorithms that keep on learning day and night; in a sense, it is very difficult to say based on what parameters the conclusions are appearing.
For example, a bank uses an AI system to approve a loan for different people. The algorithms could choose any parameter, even race/ religion/ caste/ status. This violates our moral law to treat all as equal, the companies using AI systems may not know about discrimination, but the previous year’s data shows that specific races/religions are not getting loans approved having the same status as other religions. Here, Bank cannot be blamed for discrimination, but it affects people’s morals, so it must come under the law, and there shall be ethical norms for AI systems.
We’re advancing rapidly, and even we can create systems that show human-like results; now the question is how to define human-like? Human decisions can be influenced and can be manipulated, right? Here we face the hurdle, how can one trust these AI systems to be fair?
Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
To explain ethics, we must consider situations where artificial intelligence could be unethical.
- To Deal with Unemployment when AI takes away jobs.
- Inequality in wealth creation: AI machine owners vs others
- AI mistakes and stupidity
- Security concerns/ privacy of individual
As human beings, we also choose as per individuals’ choices like clothing/ style/ food and the type of people we want to be friends with; we see merits and demerits when choosing a life partner; some belief in bloodline, and others in caste/status. So the moral of human beings is diversified.
Based on what parameters we choose for our morals are not explicitly defined, and as we build AI systems, it also learns from the data we provide. Now understand the chronology here, when we feed Terabytes of data to AI systems (we mean all human beings knowingly or unknowingly continuously feeding data to Google search Engine/ Alexa and other applications). It cannot be supervised, like what data we should feed and how much we feed, and AI deep learning algorithm is very complex and keeps on learning. Reinforcement learning improves the model, but it certainly depends on the data we provide.
Nowadays, we have built human-like artificial intelligent robots that look like humans, talk like humans, and have expressions and emotions like humans. For example, NEON AI Samsung has created AI humans. It is just beginning; now, when they interact with humans and learn; it’s possible to have influential results.
These lead us to the idea of AI ethics – which is nothing but the moral principles of individuals or groups which govern the actions of, or in our case, it is AI systems or AI human robots. We can say that Artificial Intelligence is not just technology; it affects common human beings, and defining ethics for AI is also important.
Here we are concerned about how these systems are trained, what predictions they make, and what results they provide. Bias is one of the main issues with artificial intelligence systems; we cannot make an entirely neutral AI, a field of AI as crucial as its development.
Yes, surely it works vice versa; also, humans must treat robots the same way, thus giving AI its rights, where the human can use it where it cannot. Suppose one orders a robot to kill other humans, which certainly is wrong, but robots must be capable of deciding at that time; To ensure it, we must define AI ethics today.
We all know this could be a boon or curse when it falls into the wrong hands; if terrorists can manipulate human intelligence and make jihadis, what about training these humans like robots to build artificial terrorists to harm others? It is a grave concern here.
To deal with these stated issues, AI ethics must be stated. Even some big companies like Google have defined their ethical codes of practice, saying they will use AI ethically only and never engineer it for weaponization.
Conclusion
With the Advancement of technology, it is of utter importance to have some direction defined for the moral behavior of AI machines towards human beings and vice versa. In the above article, we have discussed various scenarios where AI ethics play a vital role. We have discussed areas where AI could affect us most, like security/ privacy/ unemployment/ inequality, etc. To deal with the above concerns, big companies have ethical codes of conduct to gress in the right direction.
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