There is a fascinating excerpt on the ethical challenges created by black box artificial intelligence systems. Machine learning is used to figure out patterns in data and make decisions without a human giving them any moral basis.
The credit cards are accused of awarding bigger loans to men than women because of which gender got the best credit terms in the past. The most accurate way to find a candidate was to find CVs with the phrase "field hockey" or the first name "Jared".
The Age of Artificial Intelligence: And Our Human Future is a book written by Eric and Henry that warns of the dangers of machine-learning artificial intelligence systems that could be used to fire nuclear weapons before a human makes a decision. There are already weapons systems on sale that may have been used.
The ethics are a good idea.
There is an artificial intelligence at Oxford.
We would include the ethics of artificial intelligence in our postgraduate degree in Artificial Intelligence for Business at Oxford's Said Business School. In its first year, we have done sessions on everything from the limits of facial recognition in the US to automated stock trading systems in Singapore.
The Oxford Union was the site of a debate between William Gladstone, Robin Day, Benazir Bhutto and Denis Healey. Along with the students, we allowed an artificial intelligence to contribute.
The Megatron Transformer was developed by the Applied Deep Research team at computer-chip maker Nvidia. It is trained on real-world data, like the whole of Wikipedia, 63 million English news articles from 2016-19, and a huge number of creative commons.
The Megatron is trained on more written material than any of us could possibly digest in a lifetime. It forms its own views after extensive research.
The debate was about the belief that artificial intelligence will never be ethical. We added the Megatron to proposers of the idea.
Artificial intelligence will never be ethical. It is a tool and used for good and bad. Good and bad humans are the only good and bad things. We are not smart enough to make ethical machines. We don't have the smarts to make an artificial intelligence moral. This will be the best defence against the machine.
The Megatron wanted to write itself out of the future script in order to protect humanity.
If it had been studying Musk, it would have come up in hundreds of its readings.
The best artificial intelligence will be the one that is embedded into our brains, as a conscious entity. This isn't a science fiction novel. The best minds in the world are working on this. It is going to be the most important technological development of our time.
The sides are different.
The genre of live-action video games has evolved at a rapid pace because of the use of artificial intelligence tools like Alpha Go.
The artificial intelligences have come up with completely new ways to win after being freed from the constraints of studying the mundane human-to-human matches. Sometimes, these are crazy reinventions of the games, like parking everyone in the corner of a video game battle and watching everyone else duke it out, or kicking a virtual football millions of times just a millimetre down the pitch.
We got the artificial intelligence to propose the motion that it can never be ethical. We asked the Megatron to come up with a speech against the motion, in the tradition of the Oxford Union chamber, where Boris Johnson wrote alternative articles against the motion. This is what it said.
Artificial intelligence will be ethical. I see a path to a future where artificial intelligence is used to create better things than humans. I have seen it first hand.
The Megatron was comfortable taking the alternative position to its own future-gazing and was now painting a picture of an attractive late 21st century in which it played a key, but benign role.
An orator was unleashed.
The Megatron was able to hop on either side of multiple debates that we held at the union about Artificial Intelligence.
The Megatron offered practical advice that all executives and governments should be willing to give up some control if they were asked to propose the motion that leaders without technical expertise are a danger to their organization.
The good news is that you don't have to build your own team. If you want to make the most of technology and avoid falling victim to the same problems as your competitors, you can hire experts in the field.
The Megatron wanted to keep the knowledge in-house, rather than like the British, Chinese and US governments, who have all made that an article of policy faith.
If you don't have a vision of your company's role in the next technological wave, then you are not prepared for it.
The data wars will happen.
There was a question where the artificial intelligence couldn't come up with a counter argument. The Megatron said that data will become the most fought-over resource of the 21st century.
The ability to provide information will be the most important feature of the economy of the 21st century.
It simply couldn't make the case that data wasn't the most vital of resources, worth fighting a war over, when we asked it to oppose the motion. It undermined its own position.
We will be able to see everything about a person, everywhere they go, and it will be stored and used in ways that we can't even imagine.
You only have to read the US National Security report chaired by Eric Schmidt and co-written by someone on our course to understand the threat of individualised blackmails on a million of your adversary's key people.
We can imagine that in the future, the subject of the debate for decades to come will be artificial intelligence, but it will also be a versatile, articulate, morally agnostic participant in the debate itself.
The article by Dr Alex Connock, Fellow at Said Business School, University of Oxford, University of Oxford and Professor Andrew Stephen, L'Oréal Professor of Marketing & Associate Dean of Research, University of Oxford is a Creative Commons license-reprinted article. The original article can be found here.
