Ethics of artificial intelligence and robotics

By Vincent C. Müller. 2020

327 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are digital technologies that will have significant impact on the development of humanity in the near future. They have raised fundamental questions about what we should do with these systems, what the systems themselves should do, what risks they involve, and how we can control these. - After the Introduction to the field (§1), the main themes (§2) of this article are: Ethical issues that arise with AI systems as objects, i.e., tools made and used by humans. This includes issues of privacy (§2.1) and manipulation (§2.2), opacity (§2.3) and bias (§2.4), human-robot interaction (§2.5), employment (§2.6), and the effects of autonomy (§2.7). Then AI systems as subjects, i.e., ethics for the AI systems themselves in machine ethics (§2.8) and artificial moral agency (§2.9). Finally, the problem of a possible future AI superintelligence leading to a “singularity” (§2.10). We close with a remark on the vision of AI (§3). - For each section within these themes, we provide a general explanation of the ethical issues, outline existing positions and arguments, then analyse how these play out with current technologies and finally, what policy consequences may be drawn.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06b5090c00326183f7b3fe6e891586449e14650e

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Citations in the corpus

Ethical principles for artificial intelligence in education (2022, background): “Privacy, by nature, could be defined as “the right to be left alone”, which underscores the right of having personal information being protected (Muller, 2020 ).”
Integrating Ethics and Career Futures with Technical Learning to Promote AI Literacy for Middle School Students: An Exploratory Study (2022, background): “The inclusion of ethical consideration is crucial in AI because AI has presented substantial ethical and socio-political challenges that call for thorough philosophical and ethical analysis (Coeckelbergh, 2020; Gunkel, 2012; Müller, 2020).”
Aligning AI With Shared Human Values (2020, background): “We all eventually want AI to behave morally, but so far we have no way of measuring a system’s grasp of general human values (Müller, 2020).”
The promise of machine learning in predicting treatment outcomes in psychiatry (2021, background): “…learning al gorithms, in which the patterns the algorithm follows to make a decision for a given patient are opaque to the person and even to the developer, making very challenging (if not impossible) for the affected person to understand how the system worked out an output for him/her 190 .”
The ethics of ChatGPT - Exploring the ethical issues of an emerging technology (2024, background): “There are several attempts to identify and categorise AI-specific ethical issues, e.g. by Müller (2020) who distinguishes between ethical issues of AI systems as objects which includes privacy, manipulation, opacity, bias, human-robot interaction, employment, and the effects of autonomy and ethical…”
ChatGPT and a new academic reality: Artificial Intelligence‐written research papers and the ethics of the large language models in scholarly publishing (2023, background): “However, the increasing use of AI-generated research papers, which can be quickly produced in large numbers, poses a threat to the integrity of science by introducing potential biases and errors that are difficult to identify and correct (Muller, 2021).”
GPT-3 and InstructGPT: technological dystopianism, utopianism, and “Contextual” perspectives in AI ethics and industry (2022, background): “Indeed, Müller [46] writes, “For people who work in ethics and policy, there is a tendency to overestimate the impact and threats from a new technology, and to underestimate how far regulation can reach”.”