AI and Ethics (CS60016)
This course is sponsored by Google
Are intelligent machines friend or foe?
Course Team
Course Details
Attendance Rules
Books
Artificial Intelligence
When a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as "learning" and "problem solving"
AI IS ALREADY EVERYWHERE, EVERYDAY
You live in the age of the data-driven algorithms
Decisions that affect your life — are being made by mathematical models.
Why the rush to AI?
…its because we can
Why the rush to AI?
Why the rush to AI?
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Why the rush to AI?
Why the rush to AI?
the evil-doers?
The good
More precision
Better reliability
Increased savings
Better safety
More speed
Ray Kurzweil
We have the opportunity in the decades ahead to make major strides in addressing the grand challenges of humanity. AI will be the pivotal technology in achieving this progress.
The bad
Stephen Hawking
“Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history,…”
“Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon
systems that can choose and eliminate targets.” “…humans, limited by slow biological evolution,
couldn’t compete and would be superseded by A.I.”
Bill Gates
“I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”
Elon Musk
AI is “our greatest existential threat…”
“I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be
some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish.”
“I think there is potentially a dangerous outcome there.”
When really smart people get worried
We need to make it a habit to pay attention
!
More than 16,000 researchers and thought leaders have signed an open letter to the United Nations calling for the body to ban the creation of autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons,
“…it’s all changing so fast…”
No one before has seen the change you have seen
It is nothing compared to the change that is coming
The ugly
The
ugly
Another fatal Tesla crash reportedly on Autopilot emerges, Model S hits a streetsweeper truck – caught on dashcam
Remember I-ROBOT & Asimov’s 3 Laws
� A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
� A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
� A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
All about how to distribute “the good”! How to decide to distribute “the harm” if harm is inevitable?
The ugly (autonomous cars & the trolley predicament)
Ethical questions arise when programming cars to act in situations in which human injury or death is inevitable, especially when there are split- second choices to be made about whom to put at risk.
The ugly (Facial recognition systems)
The ugly (Facial recognition systems)
Ethical questions arise when detecting gender and age from images using AI-based facial reconition softwares
The ugly (gap-filling non-human care providers)
AI-based applications could improve health outcomes and quality of life for millions of people in the coming years— but only if they gain the trust of doctors, nurses, and patients.
The ugly (non-human directed education)
Though quality education will always require active engagement by human teachers, AI promises to enhance education at all levels,
especially by providing personalization at scale.
The ugly (lights-out economy)
The whole idea is to do something no other human—and no other machine—is doing.
If we all die, it would keep trading!
The ugly (no work for you – reskill?)
In the first machine age the vast majority of Americans worked in agriculture. Now it's less than two percent. These people didn't simply become unemployed, they reskilled.
One of the best ideas that America had was mass primary education. That's one of the reasons it became an economic leader and other countries also adopted this model of mass education, where people paid not only for their own children but other people's children to go to school.
Safe exploration - agents learn about their environment without
executing catastrophic actions?
Robustness - machine learning systems that are robust to changes in the
data distribution, or at least fail gracefully?
Avoiding negative side
effects- avoid undesired effects on the
environment?
Avoiding “reward hacking”
- prevent agents from “gaming” their reward
functions
Scalable oversight - agents efficiently achieve goals for
which feedback is very expensive?
For example, can we build an agent that tries to clean a room in the way the user would be happiest with, even feedback from the user is very rare
…and so
Carbon-based work-units unite!