Ethics of AI

Ethics of AI

What is Ethics in Artificial Intelligence?
• The notion of “artificial intelligence” (AI) is understood broadly as any kind of artificial computational system that shows intelligent behaviour, complex behaviour that is conducive to reaching goals.
• Striving to achieve goals requires AI systems to make decisions which impact human lives. E.g., autonomous cars. Taking such decisions requires rational as well as emotional understanding of how humans think and what are the values, they base their decision on.
• AI ethics is a system of moral principles and techniques intended to help this system take informed decisions ethically acceptable along with being logically optimal.

What are ethical issues associated with AI?
• Privacy and Surveillance – The advancement of AI amplifies the common issues of Data theft, Data surveillance, privacy, profiling. For example, Facial recognition in photos and videos using AI-based image processing will aid profiling and searching for individuals.
• Biased outcomes – The data used to feed AI systems isn’t representative of diversity of our societies, producing outcomes that can be said to be discriminatory. For example, AI system rely on Machine learning techniques will extract patterns from a given dataset. These patterns mimic human biases such as gender bias, racial bias.
• Automation and unemployment - AI promises to automate a large section of the job market. Some experts suggest that large scale advent of AI will generate newer kinds of jobs, but how much will it be able to compensate remains to be seen.
• Singularity - The idea of singularity is that if the trajectory of artificial intelligence reaches up to systems that have a human level of intelligence, then these systems would themselves have the ability to develop AI systems that surpass the human level of intelligence i.e. they are “superintelligent”

Some example of how it is already affecting us:
• When you type “greatest leaders of all time” in google search observe how many female personalities you will see as compared to male. It reflects Gender bias in AI.
• AI is increasingly used in court of law but is it trustworthy? It will quicken the process but can it be neutral?

What needs to be done to create an ethical AI ecosystem?
To overcome evolving challenges of AI, 193 countries at UNESCO have collectively finalized following design principles for ethical use of AI.
• The choice to use AI systems and which AI method to use should be proportional to achieve a given legitimate aim, should not infringe upon the human rights and should be based on rigorous scientific foundations.
• The continuous assessment of the human, social, cultural, economic and environmental impact of AI technologies should be carried out.
• Ensure that it is always possible to attribute ethical and legal responsibility for any stage of the life cycle of AI systems, as well as in cases of remedy related to AI systems, to physical persons or to existing legal entities.
• Participation of different stakeholders throughout the AI system life cycle is necessary for inclusive approaches to AI governance, enabling the benefits to be shared by all, and to contribute to its sustainable development.
• Ban on social scoring and mass surveillance.