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?

From September 23 to 28, 2019, the Markkula Center's Director of Technology Ethics, Brian Green, attended two Vatican-sponsored meetings on AI. AI and Faith, an organization seeking to promote conversations about AI with religious organizations, interviewed Dr. Green on his experience. This interview is cross-posted on the Markkula Center website from AI and Faith with permission. First, Brian, please summarize your background for us, especially as it relates to AI. What, particularly, has drawn you to the topic of ethical AI? I have been working on technology ethics issues, including AI, for about 15 years, starting with my graduate studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where I had a strong focus on biotechnology and ethics.

This is a contributed article by Irina Raicu, the director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. "Sometimes a type of glory lights up the mind of a man," writes John Steinbeck in his novel "East of Eden," which is set in a California valley -- Salinas, though, not Silicon. "It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. Okay, but what does that have to do with artificial intelligence? I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. That line finds an echo in our times. Various ethicists are writing, these days, about the concerns that AI might eliminate some things "we hold good" -- and not just meaning "jobs." They write, for example, about the threat of "moral de-skilling" in the age of algorithmic decision-making. About what might be lost or diminished by the advent of robot caretakers. About what role humans will play, in general, in an age of machine learning and neural networks making so many of the decisions that shape human lives. "It is true," Steinbeck writes, A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. We are in the process of shifting from the kind of mass production that Steinbeck talked about to a kind of mass production that requires much less human involvement. If "mass method" was bound to get into our thinking back then, how is it shaping our thinking now? Is this what the current focus on data collection and analysis of patterns is about? "In our time," adds Steinbeck, This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. In our own time, AI is spreading into all the various spheres of our lives, and there is tension and great concern about its impact. We are confused by dueling claims that AI will eliminate jobs or create new ones; that it will eliminate bias or perpetuate it and make it harder to identify; that it will lead us to longer, happier lives -- or to extinction. "At such a time," writes Steinbeck's narrator, "it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions.

Currently the world is rapidly developing robotic and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. These technologies offer enormous potential benefits, yet there are also drawbacks and dangers. Using the Ethics Center's Framework for Ethical Decision Making, we can consider some of the ethical issues involved with Robots and AI. Utilitarianism is a form of moral reasoning which emphasizes the consequences of actions. Typically it tries to maximize happiness and minimize suffering, though there are other ways to use utilitarian evaluation such as cost-benefit analysis.

Recently, the federal office of Science and Technology Policy issued a request for public feedback on "overarching questions in [Artificial Intelligence], including AI research and the tools, technologies, and training that are needed to answer these questions." OSTP is in the process of co-hosting four public workshops in 2016 on topics in AI in order to spur public dialogue on these topics and to identify challenges and opportunities related to this emerging technology. These topics include the legal and governance issues for AI, AI for public good, safety and control for AI, and the social and economic implications of AI. The Request for Information lists 10 specific topics on which the government would appreciate feedback, including "the use of AI for public good" and "the most pressing, fundamental questions in AI research, common to most or all scientific fields." One of the academics who answered the request for information is Shannon Vallor, who is the William J. Rewak Professor at Santa Clara University, and one of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics' faculty scholars.