The 4th Industrial Revolution is the culmination of the digital age. Nowadays, technologies such as robotics, nanotechnology, genetics, and artificial intelligence promise to transform our world and the way we live. Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Safety is an emerging research field that has been gaining popularity in recent years. Several private, public and non-governmental organizations have published guidelines proposing ethical principles for regulating the use and development of autonomous intelligent systems. Meta-analyses of the AI Ethics research field point to convergence on certain principles that supposedly govern the AI industry. However, little is known about the effectiveness of this form of Ethics. In this paper, we would like to conduct a critical analysis of the current state of AI Ethics and suggest that this form of governance based on principled ethical guidelines is not sufficient to norm the AI industry and its developers. We believe that drastic changes are necessary, both in the training processes of professionals in the fields related to the development of software and intelligent systems and in the increased regulation of these professionals and their industry. To this end, we suggest that law should benefit from recent contributions from bioethics, to make the contributions of AI ethics to governance explicit in legal terms.

There is no universally agreed definition of AI. Broadly speaking, AI tends to refer to computing technologies that replicate or resemble processes and tasks associated with human intelligence, such as reasoning, sensory understanding, and interaction. AI technologies work in different ways, but most use large quantities of data to produce an output. For example, machine learning, a type of AI that has been particularly successful in recent years, works by learning and deriving its own rules from data and experience. At the moment, most health-related applications of AI are at the research or early trial stage and it is not yet clear how successful they will be in wider healthcare systems.

On October 14-15, 2016, the NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness in conjunction with the NYU Center for Bioethics will host a conference on "The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence". Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) makes questions about the ethics of AI more pressing than ever. Existing AI systems already raise numerous ethical issues: for example, machine classification systems raise questions about privacy and bias. AI systems in the near-term future raise many more issues: for example, autonomous vehicles and autonomous weapons raise questions about safety and moral responsibility. AI systems in the long-term future raise more issues in turn: for example, human-level artificial general intelligence systems raise questions about the moral status of the systems themselves.

On October 14-15, 2016, the NYU Center for Bioethics in conjunction with NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness will host a conference on "The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence". Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) makes questions about the ethics of AI more pressing than ever. Existing AI systems already raise numerous ethical issues: for example, machine classification systems raise questions about privacy and bias. AI systems in the near-term future raise many more issues: for example, autonomous vehicles and autonomous weapons raise questions about safety and moral responsibility. AI systems in the long-term future raise more issues in turn: for example, human-level artificial general intelligence systems raise questions about the moral status of the systems themselves.