Will Artificial Intelligence Produce Synthetic Sociopaths? - AI Summary

A Turing Test for Ethical Artificial Intelligence ("AI") Initially called "The Imitation Game," one version of the test imagines that a human evaluator communicates in writing with a human participant and a computer designed to emulate human language and responses. Encouraged by the power and possibility of natural-language programs and self-learning algorithms, technologists and ethicists have begun exploring whether machines might pass an Ethical Imitation Game -- whether they can convincingly imitate the empathy necessary for ethical deliberation and decision making. It is an axiom of Systems Analysis that the meaning of a system lies outside the system. Analogously, programs written to simulate empathy successfully will represent synthetic sociopaths, faking empathy to further the ends of their programmers. Those pursuing ethical AI might therefore want to ask themselves not What they seek, nor How they might attain it, but Why they want programs to simulate empathy.