The Road to Artificial Intelligence: An Ethical Minefield

The term "Artificial Intelligence" conjures, in many, an image of an anthropomorphized Terminator-esque killer robot apocalypse. Hollywood movies, in recent decades, have served to only further this notion. Physicists and moral philosophers like Max Tegmark and Sam Harris, however, claim we need not fear a runaway superintelligence to adequately worry about the deleterious effects endemic to the AI space, but rather that competence on behalf of machines is a sufficiently frightening springboard from which an irreversibly harmful future can be launched. That said, there are currently a number of far more nefarious, insidious, and relevant ethical dilemmas which warrant our attention. In a world increasingly controlled by automated processes, rapidly approaching is a time in which adaptive, self-improving algorithms guide or even dictate most of the decisions that define human experience.