Concept

Ethics of artificial intelligence

Overview

The ethics of artificial intelligence covers a broad range of topics within AI that are considered to have particular ethical stakes. This includes algorithmic biases, fairness, accountability, transparency, privacy, and regulation, particularly where systems influence or automate human decision-making. It also covers various emerging or potential future challenges such as machine ethics (how to make machines that behave ethically), lethal autonomous weapon systems, arms race dynamics, AI safety and alignment, technological unemployment, AI-enabled misinformation, how to treat certain AI systems if they have a moral status (AI welfare and rights), artificial superintelligence and existential risks.

Some application areas may also have particularly important ethical implications, like healthcare, education, criminal justice, or the military.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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1. But one is nevertheless justified in making a great difference between the necessity which constrains the wise to do good, and which is termed moral, existing even in relation to God, and that blind necessity whereby according to Epicurus, Strato, Spinoza, and perhaps Mr. Hobbes, things exist without intelligence and without choice, and consequently without God. Indeed, there would according to them be no need of…

   Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil

   States what Ethics of artificial intelligence is; the author is tied to Ethics of artificial intelligence in the knowledge graph.

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2. Moreover the morality of a time becomes consolidated into proverbs, maxims and law-codes. It takes shape in certain habitual ways of looking at and judging matters. All these are instilled into the growing mind through language, literature, association and legal custom, until they leave in the mind a corresponding habit and attitude toward things to be done. This process may be compared to the process by which…

   John Dewey, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics

   States what Ethics of artificial intelligence is.

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3. Again, by means of these two tests we may likewise know the difference between men and brutes. For it is highly deserving of remark, that there are no men so dull and stupid, not even idiots, as to be incapable of joining together different words, and thereby constructing a declaration by which to make their thoughts understood; and that on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect or happily…

   René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences

   The author is tied to Ethics of artificial intelligence in the knowledge graph.

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Related ideas

• Moral agency
• Subjective character of experience
• Artificial intelligence
• Government
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Technocracy
• Max Tegmark
• Harvard University
• Frankenstein
• Stephen Hawking
• Turing test
• Noam Chomsky
• UNESCO
• Normative ethics
• René Descartes
• David Chalmers
• Romanticism
• Speciesism
• The Matrix
• Empathy
• The New York Times
• Age of Enlightenment
• United Kingdom
• United Nations

Opposing perspectives

• Machine ethics

Place in the tradition

Part of Philosophy of artificial intelligence.

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