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The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: Navigating the Field
The rise of artificial intelligence is changing our lives in fundamental ways. Algorithms know us better than our friends and relatives, we outsource more and more of our decision-making to AI, and much of our socio-economic structure is reliant on algorithmic systems.
The future of AI will likely bring substantial benefits. However, like the development of any revolutionary technology, it will also come with costs.
Some of these costs are inevitable. It’s likely that we are exchanging more of our autonomy for higher levels of convenience and efficiency as we integrate AI into our lives. Other costs could be more significant and possibly catastrophic. It’s no surprise then, that the ethics of artificial intelligence is a growing field. Many institutions, for example, are setting up guidelines for the use and design of AI.
In this article, I lay out the terrain of the ethics of artificial intelligence.
What AI is
Any ethics of artificial intelligence needs to pin down what AI is, since even defining it is controversial. I’m going to defer to a definition provided by an expert group set up by the European Commission:
Artificial Intelligence is “software…systems…that, given a complex goal, act in the physical or…
