New Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence Will Not Solve the Ethics Problems

The European Commission has just published a white paper setting out guidelines for artificial intelligence.  They hope to 'address the risks associated with certain uses of this new technology,' including concerns around privacy and human dignity.

These are only the latest steps to catch up with the new technology.  Oxford University has already launched a special program to keep artificial intelligence on the straight and narrow, while the World Economic Forum and others have highlighted the profound moral implications of AI.

The root of the fear is this: whereas earlier technological advances affected just our actions, artificial intelligence is replacing our thoughts.  Labor-saving devices are morphing into a decision-making machine, and they operate in a moral vacuum.   

Until now, the tough calls have fallen to programmers who write algorithms.  Although the point of AI is that machines learn for themselves, the course they choose is set from the start by people who write the code.

While both the Pentagon and the European Commission are right to be alarmed at the profound ethical dimension to artificial intelligence, they are wrong to presume AI raises new ethical problems.  It doesn’t – it just repaints old ones in technicolor.  These problems have never been properly solved, and probably never will be.

Consider just these three of the most worrisome dilemmas Artificial Intelligence is said to create.

In fact, all the problems which haunt artificial intelligence coders today can be traced back to conundrums, which vexed the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.  The 23 centuries since he died have seen attempts to solve them, and some progress, but we still lack a definite answer to the fundamental question, ‘What should we do?’  Neither today’s European Commission paper nor the emerging Pentagon proposals will take us closer to a solution.

Some in the tech world – especially those who have cracked previously uncrackable problems before – are hoping money and brains will lead to a solution.  After all, the determined genius of Newton and Einstein solved physics.  Why can’t a little investment solve ethics in the same way?

The answer is that ethics is, at heart, a different sort of problem.

When we humans make decisions, we instinctively locate right and wrong in several places at once: in the motives behind the choice, in the type of action we do, and in the consequences, we bring about.  Only if you focus on just a single place in the decision-making process – just on consequences, say - then you can rank and compare every option, but inevitably you will miss something out.

So, if an AI system was certain what to do when good deeds lead to a bad outcome, or when bad motives help people out, we should be very wary: it would be offering moral clarity when really there wasn’t any.

It is just conceivable that AI, rather than being a cause of moral problems, could help solve them.  By using big data to anticipate the future and by helping us work out what would happen if everybody followed certain rules, artificial intelligence makes rule- and consequence-based ethics much easier.  Applied thoughtfully, AI could help answer some tricky moral quandaries.  In a few years, the best ethical advice may even come from an app on our phones.

Both the European Commission and Pentagon approach leave that possibility open.

It wouldn’t mean the profound ethical problems raised by artificial ethics had been solved, though.  They will never be solved – because they do not have a single, certain solution.

Iain King CBE FRSA is a visiting fellow in the Europe Program at CSIS. From 2016 to 2019, he served as defense counsellor at the British Embassy in Washington D.C., where he oversaw defense policy and nuclear cooperation between the United Kingdom and the United States. Previously, Iain led the UK’s portfolio of research on conflict, ran UK efforts to learn lessons from foreign engagements, and was director of programmes at the UK’s main overseas democracy support foundation. He has pioneered localized stabilization drives in Helmand, Afghanistan; coordinated international civilian work in Benghazi, Libya during the 2011 war; and was the UN Administration in Kosovo’s head of planning soon after NATO’s military intervention.