Designing an AI ethics framework

More than 60 years after the discipline's birth,2 artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a preeminent issue in business, public affairs, science, health, and education. Algorithms are being developed to help pilot cars, guide weapons, perform tedious or dangerous work, engage in conversations, recommend products, improve collaboration, and make consequential decisions in areas such as jurisprudence, lending, medicine, university admissions, and hiring. But while the technologies enabling AI have been rapidly advancing, the societal impacts are only beginning to be fathomed. Until recently, it seemed fashionable to hold that societal values must conform to technology's natural evolution--that technology should shape, rather than be shaped by, social norms and expectations. For example, Stewart Brand declared in 1984 that "information wants to be free."3 In 1999, a Silicon Valley executive told a group of reporters, "You have zero privacy … get over it."4 In 2010, Wired magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly published a book entitled What Technology Wants.5 "Move fast and break things" has been a common Silicon Valley mantra.6 But this orthodoxy has been undermined in the wake of an ever-expanding catalog of ethically fraught issues involving technology. While AI is not the only type of technology involved, it has tended to attract the lion's share of discussion about the ethical implications.