The data science revolution has important ethical underpinnings. The authors make a powerful case for the development of AI ethics as a subject in its own right. The Ethical Algorithm shows that apocalyptic predictions of an algorithmized society are far from inevitable. Anyone interested in AI should read and process this essential book.

To do this, Evans and his team are turning ethical theories into a language that can be read by computers. Utilitarian philosophers, for example, believe all lives have equal moral weight and so an algorithm based on this theory would assign the same value to passengers of the car as to pedestrians. There are others who believe that you have a perfect duty to protect yourself from harm. "We might think that the driver has some extra moral value and so, in some cases, the car is allowed to protect the driver even if it costs some people their lives or puts other people at risk," Evans said. As long as the car isn't programmed to intentionally harm others, some ethicists would consider it acceptable for the vehicle to swerve in defense to avoid a crash, even if this puts a pedestrian's life at risk.

When people think of the ethical issues surrounding algorithms and AI, too many of us think of killer robots or movies like "The Matrix." But plenty of reasonable people are now rightly concerned that algorithms, far from being unbiased, can be used to perpetuate unjust or racist results. Last May, ProPublica published an article declaring that, "There's software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it's biased against blacks." ProPublica went on to detail how an algorithm used by parole boards to predict whether a criminal would re-offend was more likely to give bad scores to blacks than whites. There are plenty of other examples of algorithms which crank out ethically problematic results.