Gigaom AI Minute – March 19

Transcript

Can artificial intelligence be ethical or, by extension, unethical? At present we must answer the question, no. A programmer can program it to act in an ethical or unethical way, but we cannot say that the artificial intelligence itself has any ethical predisposition of any kind.

This is an important decision to make because it still rests all responsibility on the human programmer and doesn't give anyone a convenient out, that it was after all the program that did something. We're still at an era where programs are completely deterministic and their behavior is completely pre-determined by the programmer. In humans, at present, is the only place we can say ethical responsibility lives.