Artificial Intelligence & Ethics
Last time I was reading about ethics, it was in college while I was preparing for my semester examinations and the title was “Engineering & Ethics”. I wondered how ethics play an important role in day to day life of every individual. Many decisions we make in our daily life, ethics have an important role to play, might be subconsciously, but it does. We all act differently in similar situations, some of us think about personal benefit and some think about the community. Does thinking about your personal benefit make you unethical? You may try to find the answer to this question after reading this.
With the growing investment in technology, we are close to living in a world surrounded by machines. And with AI, we are letting machines make decisions for us. In this age of technology where autonomous vehicles are the next big thing in the Automobile Industry, more than 50 companies are working in the direction while Google & Uber leading the market. And if we are going into the age of Autonomous Vehicles, Cars to be more specific we are giving bigger decision-making power to AI, now they are not only recommending us which Netflix series to watch but also to choose you to save you or the pedestrian if you are traveling in Autonomous cars. Wait!!! What?? Yes, AI chooses to save the rider or pedestrian if such a situation arises. Scared??
Ethics in daily life
If you have ever driven a car you can understand the situation better. Can you think of how many decisions you take while you are driving for even 1 KM on a busy road? You choose not to run over any pedestrian even if he suddenly pops up to cross the road, even though you have to apply emergency brakes and you get jerked. Why did you choose to do so?? Remember the title “Ethics”. Ethics play an important role in all such decisions, even though we don’t realize it. Think of another situation, you are driving a car and suddenly a boy starts crossing the road, a truck with high speed moving just behind you. What will you choose? You may choose not to hit the boy which will lead to heavy damage to your vehicle and you. May even take your life. And you can choose to hit the boy and save yourself. And as a driver, you have to take such a decision within the moment of time. What helps you is “Ethics” again. Different people react differently in such situations with the best of their ethical values.
Moral Machine
So now when you understand the problem, you must be thinking about how we are going to transfer this knowledge to a machine? Many researchers are working in the direction to solve this problem. We can’t say the AI algorithms always save the rider or always the pedestrian. It has to be situational. So, a group of researchers from MIT started a project called Moral Machine. I suggest you visit the site and play the game by clicking Start Judging. This is a game designed to understand human behavior and ethical values over regions.
As per responses collected from many users, most of the people wanted to save the pedestrian. But no one wants to buy a car where AI is biased towards pedestrians. Wondered!! Another example of complex human behavior.
As per an interview given by Azim Shariff & Jean-Francois Bonnefon, people behind the Moral Machine, Jean says the decision making by a human is always influenced by so many factors, but AI models always behave with whatever situation it is trained with.
“We cannot program ourselves to do what we would like to do because we act on instinct. But with machines, we can tell them what we want them to do.”
And over the response collected with their small puzzle, he presents some sad reality but the facts. People choose to run over people with low financial status than a richer person. Over the different regions, a few things were common such as Choosing women & elderly people to save. While the researchers tried to make an impact, this particular problem has become tedious to solve. Different AI researchers responded with “Such situations are rare”. But the fact is such a situation is rare for an individual, but if the same AI model is driving 10,000 cars in real time, the occurrence of such a situation becomes often. And scary at the same time.
What is the Solution?
So in such a situation, where an automobile company can’t be biased to save the pedestrian or the rider, a government policy has to be there. Germany is one of the first countries to make any state policy on such cases. And ethics plays an important role in it.
In case you attempted the Game
The questionnaire is designed in a very smart way. While you are taking very little time to judge the scenarios, all the time ethics play a role subconsciously. If you analyze your answers later, you can easily relate to why did you choose to save the rider in one case and the pedestrian in other cases.
