Where AI and ethics meet

Given a swell of dire warnings about the future of artificial intelligence over the last few years, the field of AI ethics has become a hive of activity. These warnings come from a variety of experts such as Oxford University's Nick Bostrom, but also from more public figures such as Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking. The picture they paint is bleak. In response, many have dreamed up sets of principles to guide AI researchers and help them negotiate the maze of human morality and ethics. Now, a paper in Nature Machine Intelligence throws a spanner in the works by claiming that such high principles, while laudable, will not give us the ethical AI society we need.