Is AI just another technology, or does it fundamentally change the way we live and think?
Every technology has a direct impact with micro-ethical consequences, some good, some bad. However more profound are the ways in which some technologies reshape the very fabric of society with macro-ethical impacts. The invention of the stirrup revolutionised mounted combat, but as a side effect gave rise to the feudal system, which still shapes politics today. The internal combustion engine offers personal freedom and creates pollution, but has also transformed the nature of urban planning and international trade. When we look at AI the micro-ethical issues, such as bias, are most obvious, but the macro-ethical challenges may be greater.
At a micro-ethical level AI has the potential to deepen social, ethnic and gender bias, issues I have warned about since the early 1990s! It is also being used increasingly on the battlefield. However, it also offers amazing opportunities in health and educations, as the recent Nobel prizes for the developers of AlphaFold illustrate. More radically, the need to encode ethics acts as a mirror to surface essential ethical problems and conflicts.
At the macro-ethical level, by the early 2000s digital technology had already begun to undermine sovereignty (e.g. gambling), market economics (through network effects and emergent monopolies), and the very meaning of money. Modern AI is the child of big data, big computation and ultimately big business, intensifying the inherent tendency of digital technology to concentrate power. AI is already unravelling the fundamentals of the social, political and economic world around us, but this is a world that needs radical reimagining to overcome the global environmental and human challenges that confront us. Our challenge is whether to let the threads fall as they may, or to use them to weave a better future.
Slides
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Artificial Intelligence: humans at the heart of algorithms
AI for Social Justice