Artificial Intelligence and Ethics: Sixteen Challenges and Opportunities

Brian Patrick Green is the director of Technology Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. This article is an update of an earlier article which can be found here [1]. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are rapidly transforming society and will continue to do so in the coming decades. This social transformation will have deep ethical impact, with these powerful new technologies both improving and disrupting human lives. AI, as the externalization of human intelligence, offers us in amplified form everything that humanity already is, both good and evil. At this crossroads in history we should think very carefully about how to make this transition, or we risk empowering the grimmer side of our nature, rather than the brighter. Why is AI ethics becoming a problem now?