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.

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY – Last month, AlphaGo, a computer program specially designed to play the game go, caused shock waves among aficionados when it defeated Lee Sidol, one of the world's top-ranked professional players, winning a five-game tournament by a score of 4-1. Why, you may ask, is that news? Twenty years have passed since the IBM computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and we all know computers have improved since then. But Deep Blue won through sheer computing power, using its ability to calculate the outcomes of more moves to a deeper level than even a world champion can. Go is played on a far larger board (19 by 19 squares, compared to eight by eight for chess) and has more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe, so raw computing power was unlikely to beat a human with a strong intuitive sense of the best moves.

With driverless cars already on California roads, it is not too soon to ask whether we can program a machine to act ethically.