New technologies are changing our daily lives and raising ethical questions that did not exist before. The changes in the life of humanity that artificial intelligence can and is already bringing are challenging to compare with what has appeared before. Humanity can eliminate most of the known professions and potentially create a new form of life. Today, most people are calm about using AI companions. However, there are profound ethical dilemmas behind this. Let’s take a closer look at them.
Scope of Application
We are no longer surprised to receive advice from a bot in a support chat. It often gives comprehensive answers, and human assistance is no longer required. However, the use of this technology has gone much further. For example, on the www.museland.ai platform, you can play with AI. You choose a character and start a conversation with him. The hero behaves according to the image, immersing you in a lifelike roleplay.
So, it turns out that you no longer need to interact with other people to play roleplaying games. Now, you always have an AI that is entirely devoid of human shortcomings and can provide you with complete and uninterrupted communication. This would seem to be great. However, AI roleplay is only one side of the story. Sometimes, people can create a virtual partner for themselves and forget they are communicating with a machine.
Major Ethical Issues
What essential aspects become apparent if we move away from the harmless use of AI chat for entertainment purposes? Let’s figure it out.
Unemployment
The hierarchy of work is mainly about automation. By inventing new ways to automate work, we can make room for new, more complex jobs, moving away from the physical work that dominated the pre-industrial world to the cognitive work that characterizes our globalized society’s strategic and administrative work.
Consider trucking: millions of people work in the US alone. What will happen to them if the self-driving trucks promised by Elon Musk become widely available within a decade? On the other hand, self-driving trucks seem like an utterly ethical choice if we consider the reduced risk of car accidents. The same scenario could apply to office workers, who comprise most of the workforce in developed countries.
Inequality
Our economic system is based on compensation for contributions to the economy, often measured by hourly wages. Most companies still rely on hourly labor for products and services. However, by using AI, a company can significantly reduce its reliance on human labor, meaning fewer people will receive the income. As a result, the people who own the companies where AI performs the work will receive all the money.
Humanity
AI-powered bots are getting better at simulating human conversation and relationships. This stage is just the beginning of an era where we often interact with machines as if they were humans. While humans are limited in the attention and kindness they can spend on another person, bots can spend almost unlimited resources on building relationships.
On the other hand, perhaps we can think of another way to use software that can effectively direct human attention and elicit specific actions. Used correctly, it may lead to the ability to guide society toward more beneficial behavior. However, in the wrong hands, it can also be harmful.
Potential Errors
Intelligence will come from learning, whether you are a human or a machine. Systems typically undergo a training phase where they “learn” to detect the right patterns and act on the input. Once the system is fully trained, it can move into a testing phase where it is given different examples and see how it handles them.
The training phase cannot cover all the possible examples a system might encounter in the real world. Such systems can be fooled in ways that humans cannot. For example, random patterns of dots can make machines “see” things that are not there. If we rely on AI to lead us to a world of new work, safety, and efficiency, we must ensure that the machines behave as intended and that humans cannot hijack them for personal gain.
Security
The more powerful a technology becomes, the more likely it will be used for nefarious purposes. This applies to robots designed to replace human soldiers or autonomous weapons and AI systems that can cause harm if used maliciously. Cybersecurity will become increasingly crucial as battles involving them move beyond the battlefield. After all, we are dealing with a system that is much faster and more capable than we are.
The Problem of Control
Humans are at the top of the food chain, not because we have sharp teeth or strong muscles. Human dominance is built almost entirely on our ingenuity and intelligence. We can get the best of bigger, faster, stronger animals by creating tools to control them: physical ones, like cages and guns, and cognitive ones, like training.
This raises a serious question about artificial intelligence: will it one day gain the same advantage over us? We can’t just rely on pulling the plug because a sufficiently advanced machine can anticipate this move and protect itself. This is called the “singularity”: when humans will no longer be the most intelligent beings on Earth.
AI Rights
While neuroscientists work to unravel the secrets of conscious experience, we understand more about the basic mechanisms of reward and aversion. Even the simplest animals have these mechanisms. In some ways, we are creating similar mechanisms in artificial intelligence systems. For example, reinforcement learning is like training a dog: progress on a task is reinforced by a virtual reward. Right now, such systems are pretty superficial but are becoming more complex and alive. Can we consider that a system suffers if its reward function is given negative input?
Conclusion
Despite the seriousness of all the problems listed above, we should not reject the use of artificial intelligence. Humanity must find answers to the questions that have arisen and get used to coexisting with such a powerful tool. Meaningful and reasonable use of neural networks will only benefit us.
