AI Ethical Dilemma

Akshala Bhatnagar
Sep 5, 2018 · 2 min read

I recently watched the movie I, Robot which puts forward a probing question for our generation. In the movie, a car accident occurs in which two cars are pushed into the river. In one car is an adult man and in the other one is an 11-year-old girl. A robot which is passing by jumps in and saves the man because according to his analysis the chances of the man surviving the accident are more than that of the girl’s. A human being might have behaved differently and tried to save the child. This gives rise to an ethical dilemma.

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

With the increasing focus towards the artificial intelligence technology, this is something that we need to think about. AI has been developed by people, who like all of us, have their prejudices and preconceived notions about matters. AI may be influenced by the data that is used to train it, and this data may carry the prejudices of those who generated it. This may imply that AI may consider the life of a white man more important than that of a black one. The rich may be favored over the poor or males may have an advantage over females in AI decision making.

A few years ago Microsoft had created a chatbot Tay, which would learn from the people that it conversed with. They had to shut it down after one day because it became very racist and obnoxious due to the kind of people that it engaged with it. We want our technology to be ever evolving but how do we keep a check against such behavior?

Suppose in the future you buy a self-driving car. If a mishap occurs, would the car react in a way that saves the owner or would it consider someone else’s life to be of more value? As a customer, you would want it to give utmost importance to your life, but this might be unfair to others.

There is a fine line between what is right and wrong in this kind of a problem. This is an ethical dilemma for AI developers.

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