Abstract
Human beings have been aware of the risks associated with knowledge or its associated technologies since the dawn of time. Not just in Greek mythology, but in the founding myths of Judeo-Christian religions, there are signs and warnings against these dangers. Yet, such warnings and forebodings have never made as much sense as they do today. This stems from the emergence of machines capable of cognitive functions performed exclusively by humans until recently. Besides those technical problems associated with its design and conceptualization, the cognitive revolution, brought about by the development of AI also gives rise to social and economic problems that directly impact humanity. Therefore, it is vital and urgent to examine AI from a moral point of view. The moral problems are two-fold: on the one hand, those associated with the type of society we wish to promote through automation, complexification and power of data processing available today; on the other, how to program decision-making machines according to moral principles acceptable to those humans who will share knowledge and action with them.
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Notes
Homer is an inescapable figure of Western culture. The presumed author of the two founding works of European literature—the Iliad and the Odyssey—would be blind. He lived there in the eighth century bc, and although the Greeks of the classical period had him for a real person, the fact is that we do not have any document that substantiates such a consideration. We only know that someone has written the narratives of the Greek oral tradition using an elaborate poetic, and that someone became known as “Homer”.
The Myth of Pandora appears in the “Theogony” of Hesiod (eighth–seventh century bc), vv. 590–593 and vv. 604–607.
Themes developed in the “Prometheus Chained” tragedy by Aeschylus (fifth century bc).
Whenever the distinction is not important, we shall use “ethics” and “morality” interchangeably, as is common usage.
Cf. Moor (2006).
For the moment, we shall use “ethics” and “morals” interchangeably, as is common usage. Though, properly speaking, “ethics” refers to some collection metaphysical principles, and “morals” refers to concrete cultural norms following from such principles.
Pereira and Saptawijaya (2016).
Saptawijaya and Pereira (2018).
Han and Pereira (2018).
Readers wishing to explore further can visit the author's publications page at https://userweb.fct.unl.pt//~lmp/publications/Biblio.html.
There they may consult dozens of research articles—both of a philosophical or a technical nature—whether in cognitive and population domains. The ongoing research is based on theory, programming, experimentation, and verification of interdisciplinary consonance with what is known of reality, evolutionary and present.
Actually, it is the 1st of the Three Laws of Robotics idealized by Isaac Asimov, condensed in Law Zero: “A robot cannot cause evil to humanity or, by default, allow humanity to suffer evil.”
It can be viewed in the following link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9QirqaWp7gPUXBpbmtDYzJpbTQ/view?usp=sharing, also being explained in detail, in English, here (and references therein): https://userweb.fct.unl.pt//~lmp/publications/online-papers/lp_app_mach_ethics.pdf.
The robot shows what he is thinking in a balloon, and it shows how the user gives it new moral rules to join previous ones, sometimes supplanting them when there is a contradiction between them.
For the technical details consult Pereira et al. (2017).
For a summary of the project see Han et al. (2019).
As an example, see How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care—IEEE Spectrum, 2 April 2019. https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/how-ibm-watson-overpromised-and-underdelivered-on-ai-health-care.
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Acknowledgements
The author is very grateful for the many relevant comments, alternative wordings and suggestions from reviewer Jeffrey White (a native language speaker), almost all of which were adopted. The author is also very grateful for the extensive comments and suggestions proffered by António B. Lopes on an earlier draft of this paper. Support is acknowledged from grant RFP2-154 of the “Future of Life Institute”, USA, and from project FCT/MEC NOVA LINCS PEst UID/CEC/04516/2019 of the “Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia”, Portugal. The author is also thankful for the 1-h invited lecture, recorded in Portuguese, at the “Horizontes do Futuro” series promoted by town council “Câmara de Loulé”, Portugal, on 21 February 2019, from whence an antecedent of this text initially arose.
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This article consists in a topical introduction, a short synopsis, and an attention calling to our recent new book, wherein the topics broached here are awarded further detail in its 20 chapters: Pereira and Lopes (2020). It also picks up important issues from our previous book Pereira and Saptawijaya (2016). Hence his article is not an academic survey, the topics of machine ethics having become nowadays so wide and widespread. It defers to the more academic style, cum extensive references, to the above sources as well as to the plurality and variety of the more technical works of ours therein mentioned.
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Pereira, L.M. The carousel of ethical machinery. AI & Soc 36, 185–196 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00994-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00994-0