My first paper on AI ethics – written in 1996 – was called "just another artefact", and tried to get at why people mystify AI. Now again I will say, the fundamental potentials and problems of justice in an age of AI are the same as the potentials and problems of democracy more generally. We have an opportunity to codevelop a much better–though of course never perfect–world. Nature is not fair. Fairness is an impossible contradictory goal, but striving for it allows us to improve our societies. AI allows us to inform, document, and enforce our decisions on this path in new ways. But the nature of the digital revolution is that these exact same tools can be used to enforce tyranny, whether of the majority or of a monopoly-backed tyrant.
Contra the myths some in technology like to propagate, AI and the digital is not necessarily opaque, or at least no more so than human brains, or enormous governments. AI is an artefact developed through human processes. Responsibility is something held by humans and our societies; we cannot enforce responsibility against artefacts because they can be easily designed to ignore any penalty. Transparency is the means by which we trace accountability. Anything digital can be designed for transparency–can be designed to document every action done in the course of development and use of AI. So should we choose to, we could enter a new age of extreme transparency, but I think we also need to have trust. And I'll close with this: trust is a relationship between peers, where we turn a blind eye to each other's actions, allowing innovation, privacy, and just slack for human errors. So when I say we need trust, I do not mean that we should trust artefacts, or governments, or corporations. For all of these, we should demand transparency, and accountability from individual humans who must also be empowered to effect change. But for ourselves, we need trust – we need a space to make mistakes and try new things without being gotten in any kind of trouble.
- my first AI ethics paper
- longer blogpost with more links on responsibility, trust, accountability
- I was asked for a two minute statement but then someone else more important ran long so anyway I never read this and found out whether I nailed the time...
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