Recent advances in AI raise the possibility that AI systems will one day be able to do anything humans can do, only better. If artificial general intelligence (AGI) is achieved, AI systems may be able to understand, reason, problem solve, create, and evolve at a level and speed that humans will increasingly be unable to match, or even understand. These possibilities raise a natural question as to whether AI will eventually become superior to humans, a successor "digital species", with a rightful claim to assume leadership of the universe. However, a deeper consideration suggests the overlooked differentiator between human beings and AI is not the brain, but the central nervous system (CNS), providing us with an immersive integration with physical reality. It is our CNS that enables us to experience emotion including pain, joy, suffering, and love, and therefore to fully appreciate the consequences of our actions on the world around us. And that emotional understanding of the consequences of our actions is what is required to be able to develop sustainable ethical systems, and so be fully qualified to be the leaders of the universe. A CNS cannot be manufactured or simulated; it must be grown as a biological construct. And so, even the development of consciousness will not be sufficient to make AI systems superior to humans. AI systems may become more capable than humans on almost every measure and transform our society. However, the best foundation for leadership of our universe will always be DNA, not silicon.

We consider the question of what properties a Machine Ethics system should have. This question is complicated by the existence of ethical dilemmas with no agreed upon solution. We provide an example to motivate why we do not believe falling back on the elicitation of values from stakeholders is sufficient to guarantee correctness of such systems. We go on to define two broad categories of ethical property that have arisen in our own work and present a challenge to the community to approach this question in a more systematic way.

The combination of ML and UX can create really powerful products, like Visual Discovery by Pinterest, or Google's Smart Compose. And interest in the intersection is growing (our Machine Learning and User Experience Meetup has grown up to 2000 members strong).

In Silicon Valley, many companies aspire to the ideal of an ethical company. You can see this in company mottos, such as "Don't Be Evil," or in the social responsibility efforts espoused by many peer tech companies. On a deeper level, though, the behavior of companies like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others is increasingly governed by the machine-learned systems they build to run their businesses. These companies are now starting to ask themselves how they can make an informed decision about how they operate their machine learning systems in an ethical manner, instead of being driven solely by revenue or some more abstract success metric. But we, as developers, are not off the hook.

How obliged can we be to AI, and how much danger does it pose us? A surprising proportion of our society holds exaggerated fears or hopes for AI, such as the fear of robot world conquest, or the hope that AI will indefinitely perpetuate our culture. These misapprehensions are symptomatic of a larger problem—a confusion about the nature and origins of ethics and its role in society. While AI technologies do pose promises and threats, these are not qualitatively different from those posed by other artifacts of our culture which are largely ignored: from factories to advertising, weapons to political systems. Ethical systems are based on notions of identity, and the exaggerated hopes and fears of AI derive from our cultures having not yet accommodated the fact that language and reasoning are no longer uniquely human. The experience of AI may improve our ethical intuitions and self-understanding, potentially helping our societies make better-informed decisions on serious ethical dilemmas.