Ethically charged decisions and the future of ‘AI Ethics’

Ethically charged decisions and the future of ‘AI Ethics’

연구 분야: Artificial Intelligence

학회: AI & SOCIETY

It is often said that artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually take over some of our decision-making tasks and will implement solutions to problems directly and autonomously, even in high-stakes contexts like healthcare, finance, or the law. These are also the contexts most people usually bring up as examples to stress the importance of “AI ethics” This field usually aims at aligning machine decisions with human values so that we can expect the machine to take ethical considerations into account in appropriate ways. However, the question of whether AI systems really take into account ethical considerations in the first place has received less attention. In this paper, I argue that those AI systems created with the goal of taking over decisions that are ‘ethically charged’ are not the kind of decision-making entities that are normatively in a position to do so. This conclusion has important consequences for AI ethics as a discipline. Drawing on previous work, I suggest that AI ethicists should focus on articulating how AI is impacting the conditions in which humans make ethically charged decisions, rather than trying to make AI systems themselves decision-makers in ethically charged domains.