The concurrent ethical issues aroused by the development of artificial intelligence
Introduction
First, in order to establish a clear concept for the reader to facilitate the understanding of various issues later, I will provide here a clear definition of artificial intelligence i.e. Artificial Intelligence or AI, which is a new technical science that studies, develops theories, methods, technologies and application systems for simulating, extending and expanding human intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that attempts to understand the essence of intelligence and produce a new intelligent machine that can respond in a manner similar to human intelligence, and research in this field includes robotics, language recognition, image recognition, face recognition, and natural language processing. Typically sweeping robots, medical robots, attendant robots and manufacturing robots. With the development of technology and society, more and more AI products have appeared in front of the public for example the most famous voice assistants such as Alexa from Amazon, Siri from Apple, Cortana from Microsoft, or Xiaomi’s fully intelligent floor sweeping robots, DJI’s drones, etc. And the public’s attitude towards AI has also changed from a lack of acceptance at the beginning to widespread use and acceptance. In other words, AI is becoming more and more integrated into public life and society. The first example is the products and projects of DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google. DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google, is working with the NHS on a project in which they are using artificial intelligence to learn from patient scans in order to determine whether a patient has cancer or other corresponding diseases. Meanwhile, Google subsidiary DeepMind is also working on other projects such as machine learning and deep learning to determine whether patients have heart disease and early stages of Alzheimer’s disease in the above ways. Such artificial intelligence methods will soon be firmly established in the field of health care and have an unassailable position because it is difficult to make a more accurate diagnosis through human identification.
Another example is the use of AI to manage the terminal at Sydney’s Port Botany, where AI manages most of the containers entering and leaving the port, as well as managing a fleet of intermodal containers in an unmanned area.
In this way, I believe my audience has developed a common sense of what exactly AI is and how it can be used in the real world. However, as AI becomes more everyday and dependent, risks and problems emerge. Artificial intelligence brings not only benefits but also all kinds of disadvantages, and that’s what I’m going to mention in my Blog, ethical issues of artificial intelligence.
Ethical Issues
Picture representing unfair judgment
Source from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/10/top-10-ethical-issues-in-artificial-intelligence/
The emergence of artificial intelligence and the high intensity of its operation in everyday life actually brings a lot of privacy concerns such as the preventive role of artificial intelligence in helping to improve video surveillance systems in public places. Current software can continuously analyze images from which attacks can be detected and alerts can be issued quickly. But intelligent systems and the racial and social profiling techniques they may employ may be misused. For example, a facial recognition system in the United States automatically identifies all white people as low risk or non-vulnerable to society, but all other people of color are uniformly identified as high risk and somewhat dangerous to society, even if they act viciously. According to ProPublica, in 2016 many courts in the U.S. used artificial intelligence tools that could predict future crimes to manage criminals but the tool was later found to be extremely biased against black defendants. The Offender Management Analysis for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) takes into account many factors such as prior arrests, age and employment, but the results (the Offender Risk Index) are one of the factors judges use to determine whether a defendant will face jail or prison and the data is very misleading. Northpointe, the parent company of COMPAS, refutes such claims and claims that the algorithm works as intended. As well, Northpointe argued that the reason for the higher risk score for blacks as a group was that blacks had a higher baseline risk of future crime after arrest. northpointe changed its name to Equivant after this incident, and they have not publicly changed the way they calculate their risk assessment (Mesa, 2021) The existing discrimination of artificial intelligence and alogrithems do bring huge harm and damage to the relationship between citizens and citizens, being an ethical issue. We could tell that until the end of such a scandal, the company did not explain any details of the algorithm and provided no information needed to explain such a situation.
However, even some artificial intelligence such as home intelligent voice assistants or face recognition technologies have been found to collect personal information from users on a daily basis and this is actually a serious violation of the user’s personal rights such as Alexa I mentioned above.
Alexa
For here, I would like to take Alexa as a special case to analyze and investigate with details and examples due to the fact that Alexa has more ethical issues than just secretly collecting the users’ information but also recording the users’ discussions, voices and talks. From a social point of view, although Amazon in the later stage manually added and increased the usage of ‘please’ to the product settings for solving such an issue but the product has already affected and influenced a lot of innocent children and their corresponding development in their early stage which is the best for them to form correct understanding to the society and the world. For instance, the equipment of an artificial intelligence voice assistant could reinforce and advance negative behavior like using a lot of aggressive language or inappropriate voice tones and accents to respond to the user’s or the children’s instructions and commands. However, there is no definitive data or reported output on whether this can be a good guide and corrective for children. And the device or AI itself has no emotion limitation or restriction and moral restriction which means that they do not understand what they are doing but just follow the algorithm set up in their minds. And it can be very detrimental to children’s early stage development – AI exposes children to premature knowledge of sex, drugs, violence, guns and death. Artificial intelligences would not guide the growth of children and they are not even suitable babysitters but they only provide one-sided and pieces of information and do not help children to understand these things in a broader and more precise way, not caring for the growth of children.
But the situation is even worse.
Meanwhile, it is highly possible for these children to ask Alexa some over-the-top and unsuitable questions like “show me some picture of sexing,” “can drugs bring benefits”, “what is a gun,” and “show me some bloody pictures,” and Alexa automatically provides the information without filtering or sifting the content based on their age group’s criteria. Meanwhile, Alexa, this sort of voice assistant could not provide complete and fully informations and academic reports such as all the contents of a science report and a teacher’s full podcast that its ability and function limit the transferring of a amount of information. But children do not really know that the information received is extremely limited. They just consider that that would be all the information and these things are this format, leading them into a completely wrong way of losing respect for death, thinking it’s cool to take drugs, worshipping violence for no reason, and even considering the possibility of having sex at their age. While perhaps the AI assistant can be set to underage mode, this can be changed back to adult mode with a simple one-touch switch, as it does not require an identity check. And for children, they have no such ability to distinguish or identify misinformation provided from well-sourced platforms or websites such as Wikipedia or Google.’ Issues of an ethical nature are often plagued by ambiguity. (Michael 2004)
People are monitoring by CCTV
Image: Matthew Wiebe Source(Julia 2016) from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/10/top-10-ethical-issues-in-artificial-intelligence/
On top of this, children’s privacy has been violated because Amazon has stated straightly that they are collecting, recording and sharing information about children and other users. But for children, they do not exactly know what their private information is and what their privacy are, and they have no ability to understand the extent to which their sensitive information is being collected and shared, and how this affects their lives.
Unemployment
The rapid adoption of new technologies in the workplace, especially robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), has motivated some researchers to determine what effects such technologies may have. (Paul K, 2017) But the rise of artificial intelligence brings out more and more artificial intelligence by-products like I mentioned above which are voice helpers, cleaning bots and servant bots. But with the appearance of these products and the trending that these products are becoming more and more popular and normal in daily life. The unemployment rate also rises and there are a ton of complaints about this. However, for large companies like Shufeng Deliveries or DHL, they have to replace human laborers with robots or machines that came from artificial intelligence for reducing the costs and saving the budgets. Although society and companies are now taking many mitigating measures to protect the rights of workers, such as granting more unemployment benefits, subsidies or ordering companies to maintain a certain number of human resources and human labor jobs. But there is a serious problem that has not been taken into account, that is, many workers choose to become laborers because they do not have other survival skills, i.e. they can only do this job and cannot switch to other professions that require more advanced skills, such as accountants, data scientists, doctors and lawyers.
Comparison between past old style production and current one.
Source(Julia 2016) from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/10/top-10-ethical-issues-in-artificial-intelligence/
Workers always suffocate from the overall environment
If these people stop working now and are forced to lose their jobs because of the emergence of artificial intelligence robots, it is likely that they will not be able to find suitable jobs or even new jobs because of the lack of skills. If the AI product replaces human jobs again in the future, they will become a class and group that is completely abandoned by society and have no room for more. Even some highly sophisticated industry personnel will also face massive unemployment and loss of living space because of the further improvement of artificial intelligence. For these enterprises and companies, AI products are certainly more efficient, powerful and accurate than the general labor force or highly sophisticated personnel. These workers are likely to be forced to compete viciously for basic wages and to secure a certain income, for example by demanding less and less from many companies to ensure their survival in a society full of cold robots. The result of this competition is not only a more humble and cheap labor, but also the death of workers due to lack of nutrition or forced to work more hours because they have lost their initiative in the recruitment process.
So while artificial intelligence brings numerous benefits such as increased productivity, in some ways it also completely destroys the existing worker ecosystem and industry composition. And it brings more and more unexpected ethical issues.
Conclusion
A multifaceted approach to handling the social, ethical and policy issues of AI technology is needed(Ouchchy, 2020) However, the entire situation and policy need to be further discussed and researched because the ethical issues related to the possible future creation of machines with general intellectual capabilities far outstripping those of humans are quite distinct from any ethical problems arising in current automation and information systems.(Bostrom, 2020)
Reference
Bostrom, N. (2020, September 10). Ethical issues in advanced artificial intelligence: Nick Bostrom: Ta. Taylor & Francis. Retrieved April 8, 2022, from https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003074991-7/ethical-issues-advanced-artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom
King, D. (2019, September 18). Deepmind’s health team joins Google Health. RSS. Retrieved April 7, 2022, from https://www.deepmind.com/blog/deepminds-health-team-joins-google-health
Calhoun, L. (2017, January 13). 4 predictions for Artificial Intelligence in 2017. Inc.com. Retrieved April 7, 2022, from https://www.inc.com/lisa-calhoun/4-predictions-for-artificial-intelligence-in-2017.html
Mesa, N. (2021, May 13). Can the criminal justice system’s artificial intelligence ever be truly fair? Massive Science. Retrieved April 8, 2022, from https://massivesci.com/articles/machine-learning-compas-racism-policing-fairness/
Michael W.Grojean.Christian J. Resick. Marcus W. Dickson. D. Brent Smith .2004 Leaders, Values, and Organizational Climate: Examining Leadership Strategies for Establishing an Organizational Climate Regarding Ethics. Journal of Business Ethics. Academic of Management Review
Paul K, M. C. (n.d.). Journals.sagepub.com. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0894439317698637. Retrieved April 8, 2022, from https://journals.sagepub.com/action/ssostart?redirectUri=/doi/abs/10.1177/0894439317698637?journalCode=ssce
Julia Bossmann, A. (n.d.). Top 9 ethical issues in Artificial Intelligence. World Economic Forum. Retrieved April 8, 2022, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/10/top-10-ethical-issues-in-artificial-intelligence/
Ouchchy, L., Coin, A., & Dubljević, V. (2020, March 29). Ai in the headlines: The portrayal of the ethical issues of artificial intelligence in the media – AI & society. SpringerLink. Retrieved April 8, 2022, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-020-00965-5