AI and Ethics (CS60016)

Are intelligent machines friend or foe?

Course Team

• Instructors: Animesh Mukherjee, Invited guests
• Teaching Assistants:
• Sagnik Basu
• Subhanakar Swain
• Subhrajit Mitra
• Course website: https://sites.google.com/view/cs60016/home

Evaluation

• Midsem: 30%
• Endsem: 30%
• Assignment: 25%
• Random attendance: 15%

Books

• Textbook → AI and Ethics: A computational Perspective, Animesh Mukherjee
• The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design by Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns
• Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control by Stuart J. Russell
• Towards a Code of Ethics for Artificial Intelligence by Paula Boddington
• Moral machines by Wendell Wallach
• Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust by Ernest Davis and Gary Marcus

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?

• Cheaper computing
• More data
• Better algorithms

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…its because we can

Why the rush to AI?

• Decision automation is now an inevitable economic imperative
• Driven by a faster-paced, micro-managed, interconnected, automated, and optimized world
• Never-asleep autonomous decision making - it is here now

Why the rush to AI?

• Decisions are made in view of assessed positive and negative projected outcomes
• Positive and negative are merely derived (learned) weights
• Relative to some system of value
• Moving toward or away from objectives & problems

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+

Why the rush to AI?

• Weights are encoded intent
• Based on some worldview, culture, rule of law, economic goal and philosophical perspective
• So autonomous systems are encoded with intent

Why the rush to AI?

• A linked chain from software to intent
• How can we impose systems that bend code creating and learning systems toward positive intent for our friends and potentially negative intent for

the evil-doers?

The good

More precision

Better reliability

Pilots can sleep when the plane flies!

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.”

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

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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

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.

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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 recognition 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.

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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.

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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.

…and so

• AI adoption and sophistication is speeding up
• It is an economic imperative outpacing constraints
• Decision making is being coded into every system and product
• Decision making overlaps ethics and will be autonomous
• Forward thinkers are CONCERNED and starting to work this problem

Carbon-based work-units unite!