Is Ethical A.I. Even Possible?

AI is a tool, and while you can say some tools are easier to abuse than others it has not baring on their ethics since tools have no ethics to begin with.

And the leverage or force multiplication you get from a tool is directly tied to how easily it can be abused but also to how useful it is to you in general.

Is a gun less ethical than a siringe because it can be used for violence? How about siginges fuling the drug epidemic?

Are nukes less ethical than conventional weapons?

Were the looms that the luddites seek the destroy unethical because they put people out of work?

Should we consider combines and modern agriculture unethical because they drastically changed the balance of power of various nations?

Ofc not as all of these arguments are silly and flawed once you actually begin to deconstruct them.

This has nothing to do about gun control I have no problem controlling guns because I don’t want to get shot and if someone does break into my house I prefer them not to be armed.

I also prefer the police not to be armed at all times because I think that it’s just as important not to bring a gun to a knife fight as it is the other way around if you don’t want to escalate things.

I have no problem of regulating the application of AI when necessary.

However it does not mean that I think that it has anything to do with its ethics but with ours.

Some uses of AI could be deemed by society to be unethical for the same reason that society deemed that harvesting the organs of a random person to save 5 people is unethical because people wouldn’t be able to function knowing that they might be harvested at any moment.

So if we bring this back to AI it’s not that I would think that say an AI run mass surveillance system is unethical because I’m not sure if the AI can make ethical decisions I would consider it unethical if society wouldn’t be able to function well under it.

There are also other topics but it's intended as a primer for engineers interested in understanding the social problems created by new technologies.

A gun's purpose is to shoot bullets. A syringe has the purpose of delivering fluid into the human body. It's not hard to evaluate the ethics of the most common actions for each of those. While the tool itself technically has no ethics, owning or using the tool tends to have ethical implications. In a practical world, it is very fair to evaluate those implications, at least at an estimation level.

Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of complexity when it comes to tools and ethics and no easy answers, and with the luddite example it brings in questions of work ethics and societal structure, so the loom doesn't exist in a vacuum. But not all tools bring in the entirety of ethics into consideration. There are ethical estimations of tools (think of them as potential ethical energy) that we can try to estimate. Syringe > Gun seems like one we can make. Gun vs Nuke, a bit harder due to the consideration of use vs threat of use. The loom alone is pretty neutral and is far more reflective of direct context, where the context of a gun or syringe generalizes easier. And of course these are all my calculations, and you and others can have different ones, but I think if we really decided to spend 8 hours nailing down this discussion, you would indeed see a loose tiering/ranking of tools and "potential ethical energy". I wouldn't be surprised to see other measures/categories emerge either such as severity, risk, and commonality of use case.

The question becomes this: what is the "potential ethical energy" of AI. IMO it's very close to the loom in that the context matters the most, but there's also a severity of effect factor in play that makes it more dangerous. Still, I would say AI has an overall positive potential ethical energy.

Is Instagram inherently evil? Obviously not; but through the lens of pre-existing human social dynamics, including status competition, mating drives, social signaling, etc, the capabilities introduced by that particular tool almost inevitably lead to the perverse incentives of lifestyle facades, “influencers”, Fyre Festival, etc. Do we have to do these things? Of course not. But it’s naive to not think about the “realpolitik” scenarios, and what could be done to mitigate them, rather than assuming perfectly ethical and rational actors.

What makes AI even more complicated than previous technological changes to our game landscape, is the potential not for new tools, but for new players: at best, these artificial players are proxies for each of our interests (though see the side effects of “flash crashes” from high-frequency trading bots); at worst, we may have to contend with vastly intelligent new players with emergent interests of their own, which we can’t necessarily predict. While I don’t think it’s inconceivable that A.I. will always be subject to human understanding and control, we’re in such new territory that that’s fundamentally an assumption (see the arguments from Bostrom, etc).