The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

By Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky. 2014

68 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This chapter surveys some of the ethical challenges that may arise as one can create artificial intelligences (AI) of various kinds and degrees. Some challenges of machine ethics are much like many other challenges involved in designing machines. There is nearly universal agreement among modern AI professionals that artificial intelligence falls short of human capabilities in some critical sense, even though AI algorithms have beaten humans in many specific domains such as chess. In creating a superhuman chess player, the human programmers necessarily sacrificed their ability to predict Deep Blue's local, specific game behavior. A different set of ethical issues arises when one can contemplate the possibility that some future AI systems might be candidates for having moral status. One also has moral reasons to treat them in certain ways, and to refrain from treating them in certain other ways. Superintelligence may be achievable by increasing processing speed.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence

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Citations in the corpus

Computer knows best? The need for value-flexibility in medical AI (2018, unknown): “36 37 An important concept that has emerged from these discussions is ‘value sensitive design’.”
Sustainable AI: AI for sustainability and the sustainability of AI (2021, background): “Further, sustainable development is a “development paradigm as well as the concept that calls for improving living standards without jeopardising the earth’s ecosystems or causing environmental challenges such as deforestation and water and air pollution” [13, 6].”
Artificial Intelligence and the Public Sector—Applications and Challenges (2018, background): “In this context, Bostrom and Yudkowsky (2014) highlight the importance and necessity that AI technology be resilient against adverse manipulation by humans.”
Artificial intelligence in the creative industries: a review (2020, background): “A discussion of ethics associated with artificial intelligence in general can be found in [339].”
AI-GAs: AI-generating algorithms, an alternate paradigm for producing general artificial intelligence (2019, background): “The question of whether and why we should create general AI is a complicated one and is the focus of many articles [143, 41, 4, 18, 15].”
Implications of the use of artificial intelligence in public governance: A systematic literature review and a research agenda (2021, background): “…public governance questions raised by AI use in government are also intermingled with complex “ wicked problems ” faced by governments — rising perceptions of threat by societies and digital-era political turbulence, where AI is taking the central stage (Bostrom & Yudkowsky, 2014; Fountain, 2019).”