Ethics of AI

The first question concerns the kinds of AI we might achieve moral, immoral, or amoral. The second concerns the ethics of our achieving such an AI. They are more closely related than a first glance might reveal. For much of technology, the National Rifle Association’s neutrality argument might conceivably apply: “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” But if we build a genuine, autonomous AI, we arguably will have to have built an artificial moral agent, an agent capable of both ethical and unethical behavior. The possibility of one of our artifacts behaving unethically raises moral problems for their development that no other technology can.