Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the main ethical issues related to the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on human society. AI is the use of machines to do things that would normally require human intelligence. In many areas of human life, AI has rapidly and significantly affected human society and the ways we interact with each other. It will continue to do so. Along the way, AI has presented substantial ethical and socio-political challenges that call for a thorough philosophical and ethical analysis. Its social impact should be studied so as to avoid any negative repercussions. AI systems are becoming more and more autonomous, apparently rational, and intelligent. This comprehensive development gives rise to numerous issues. In addition to the potential harm and impact of AI technologies on our privacy, other concerns include their moral and legal status (including moral and legal rights), their possible moral agency and patienthood, and issues related to their possible personhood and even dignity. It is common, however, to distinguish the following issues as of utmost significance with respect to AI and its relation to human society, according to three different time periods: (1) short-term (early 21st century): autonomous systems (transportation, weapons), machine bias in law, privacy and surveillance, the black box problem and AI decision-making; (2) mid-term (from the 2040s to the end of the century): AI governance, confirming the moral and legal status of intelligent machines (artificial moral agents), human-machine interaction, mass automation; (3) long-term (starting with the 2100s): technological singularity, mass unemployment, space colonisation. This section discusses why AI is of utmost importance for our systems of ethics and morality, given the increasing human-machine interaction. AI may mean several different things and it is defined in many different ways. When Alan Turing introduced the so-called Turing test (which he called an'imitation game') in his famous 1950 essay about whether machines can think, the term'artificial intelligence' had not yet been introduced. Turing considered whether machines can think, and suggested that it would be clearer to replace that question with the question of whether it might be possible to build machines that could imitate humans so convincingly that people would find it difficult to tell whether, for example, a written message comes from a computer or from a human (Turing 1950). The term'AI' was coined in 1955 by a group of researchers--John McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude E. Shannon--who organised a famous two-month summer workshop at Dartmouth College on the'Study of Artificial Intelligence' in 1956. This event is widely recognised as the very beginning of the study of AI.