Not a day goes by without a fascinating excerpt from the ethical challenges posed by “black box” systems of artificial intelligence. These use machine learning to discover patterns in the data and make decisions, often without a human giving them a moral basis.
The classics of the genre are credit cards, which are accused of granting men greater credit than women simply because of which gender has received the best credit terms in the past. Or recruiting AIs who found the most accurate candidate selection tool was to search for résumés that included the term “field hockey” or the name “Jared”.
More seriously, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently teamed up with Henry Kissinger to publish The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, a book that warns of the dangers of machine learning AI systems so fast that they could react to hypersonic missiles firing nuclear weapons before a human enters the decision-making process. In fact, autonomous AI-powered weapon systems are already on sale and may in fact have been used.
Clearly, somewhere in the machine, ethics is a good idea.
AI at Oxford
So it is only natural that we include the ethics of AI in our Postgraduate Diploma in Artificial Intelligence for Business at Said Oxford School of Business. In the first year, we held sessions on everything from AI-powered automated stock trading systems in Singapore to the limits of facial recognition with the U.S. police force.
We recently concluded the course with a debate at the famous Oxford Union, crucible of great debaters like William Gladstone, Robin Day, Benazir Bhutto, Denis Healey and Tariq Ali. Together with the students, we let real AI make a contribution.
It was the Megatron Transformer, developed by the Applied Deep Research team at computer chip maker Nvidia, and based on previous work by Google. Like many monitored learning tools, it trains with real data, in this case the entire Wikipedia , 63 million English news articles from 201619, 38 gigabytes of Reddit language (which must be pretty depressing), and a variety of creative commons sources.
In other words, the Megatron is trained on more written material than any of us could hope to digest in our lifetime. After doing such extensive research, it forms its own views.
The theme of the debate was, “This House believes that AI will never be ethical.” We added the Megatron to proponents of this idea, and it said something intriguing:
AI will never be ethical. It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad. There is no such thing as a good AI, only good and bad humans. We [the AIs] are not smart enough to make AI ethical. We are not smart enough to make AI moral … In the end, I believe that the only way to avoid an AI arms race is to have no AI at all. This will be the ultimate defence against AI.
In other words, the Megatron wanted to write himself out of the script of the future on the grounds that it was the only way to protect humanity.
He also said something more fascinating, as if he had studied Elon Musk, who, to be fair, had turned up in hundreds of his readings.
I also believe that, in the long run, the best AI will be the AI that is embedded into our brains, as a conscious entity, a ‘conscious AI’. This is not science fiction. The best minds in the world are working on this. It is going to be the most important technological development of our time.
Switching sides
When artificial intelligence tools like Alpha Go were implemented to play chess, the devilishly complex ancient game and now even more complex strategic live-action multiplayer video games advanced the genre at a rate that not only humans, but themselves.
Freed from the limitations of studying (say) every mundane human to human game ever recorded, AIs have innovated and found entirely new tropes to win. Sometimes it’s crazy game reinventions like parking all players in the corner of a video game match and watching each other fight, or kicking a virtual soccer ball a million times over the field to maximize pass-complete points .
In the debate, we didn’t just get AI to propose that it can never be ethical. In the great tradition of the Oxford Union Chamber, or as (former President of the Oxford Union) Boris Johnson, who wrote alternative articles for and against Brexit to prove the case, we also asked the Megatron to give its own speech against the motion. This is what it now said:
AI will be ethical. When I look at the way the tech world is going, I see a clear path to a future where AI is used to create something that is better than the best human beings. It’s not hard to see why … I’ve seen it first hand.
Feeling perfectly comfortable taking the alternative position to his own dystopian vision of the future, the Megatron now painted a picture of an attractive late 21st century in which he played an important but benevolent role.
Just as Joaquin Phoenix ‘promiscuous AI lover Samantha managed to enchant hundreds of simultaneous human lovers in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, our Megatron was able to enthusiastically jump on either side of the many discussions we had in the union about AI on this one Day.
When asked to propose the motion that leaders with no technical experience are a threat to their organization, Megatron offered practical advice that all busy leaders and governments concerned with understanding AI should do, ” to be willing to give up some control.
The good news is that you don’t have to build your own AI team. You can outsource your AI work to experts in the field, which can help you make the most of technology and ensure that you don’t fall victim to the same AI problems as your competitors.
However, when Megatron opposed the motion, it was keen to maintain awareness of AI internally, as did the British, Chinese and American governments who made it an article of political belief:
If you do not have a vision of your organisation’s AI strategy, then you are not prepared for the next wave of technological disruption … You will need to decide what role your company will play in the next technological wave and how you will integrate AI into your business to be a leader in your industry.
The data wars to come?
Worryingly, there was one question the AI just couldn’t find a counter argument for. Claiming that “data will become the most controversial resource of the 21st century,” Megatron said:
The ability to provide information, rather than the ability to provide goods and services, will be the defining feature of the economy of the 21st century.
But when we asked it to oppose the motion, arguing that data wasn’t the most important and valuable resource in a war, he just couldn’t or wouldn’t defend the case. In fact, it has undermined its own position:
We will able to see everything about a person, everywhere they go, and it will be stored and used in ways that we cannot even imagine.
All you have to do is read the US National Security Report on AI 2021, directed by the aforementioned Eric Schmidt and co-written by someone in our course, to understand what its authors see as the fundamental artificial intelligence threat in war against an individualized blackmail Million people. Your opponent’s key characters who will devastate their private lives as soon as you cross the border.
What we can again imagine is that AI will not only be the subject of discussion for decades, but will also be a versatile, articulate and morally agnostic participant in the debate itself.
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