The EU is poised to effectively become the world’s AI police, creating binding rules on transparency, ethics, and more.
It’s done.
Category: ethics – Page 9
It’s hard to believe, but generative AI — the seemingly ubiquitous technology behind ChatGPT — was launched just one year ago, in late November 2022.
Still, as technologists discover more and more use cases for saving time and money in the enterprise, schools, and businesses the world over are struggling to find the technology’s rightful balance in the “real world.”
As the year has progressed, the rapid onset and proliferation has led to not only rapid innovation and competitive leapfrogging, but a continued wave of moral and ethical debates and has even led to early regulation and executive orders on the implementation of AI around the world as well as global alliances — like the recent Meta + IBM AI Alliance — to try and develop open frameworks and greater standards in the implementation of safe and economically sustainable AI.
Nevertheless, a transformative year with almost daily shifts in this exciting technology story. The following is a brief history of the year in generative AI, and what it means for us moving forward.
Stanford University researchers say AI ethics practitioners report lacking institutional support at their companies.
A new study, published in PLOS ONE, has uncovered a remarkable connection between individuals’ musical preferences and their moral values, shedding new light on the profound influence that music can have on our moral compass.
The research, conducted by a team of scientists at Queen Mary University of London and ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy, employed machine learning techniques to analyze the lyrics and audio features of individuals’ favorite songs, revealing a complex interplay between music and morality.
“Our study provides compelling evidence that music preferences can serve as a window into an individual’s moral values,” stated Dr. Charalampos Saitis, one of the senior authors of the study and Lecturer in Digital Music Processing at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science.
One group, A.I. and Faith, convenes tech executives to discuss the important questions about faith’s contributions to artificial intelligence. The founder David Brenner explained, “The biggest questions in life are the questions that A.I. is posing, but it’s doing it mostly in isolation from the people who’ve been asking those questions for 4,000 years.” Questions such as “what is the purpose of life?” have long been tackled by religious philosophy and thought. And yet these questions remained answered and programmed by secular thinkers, and sometimes by those antagonistic toward religion. Technology creators, innovators, and corporations should create accessibility and coalitions of diverse thinkers to inform religious thought in technological development including artificial intelligence.
Independent of development, faith leaders have a critical role to play in moral accountability and upholding human rights through the technology we already use in everyday life including social media. The harms of religious illiteracy, misinformation, and persecution are largely perpetrated through existing technology such as hate speech on Facebook, which quickly escalated to mass atrocities against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. Individuals who have faith in the future must take an active role in combating misinformation, hate speech, and online bullying of any group.
The future of artificial intelligence will require spiritual intelligence, or “the human capacity to ask questions about the ultimate meaning of life and the integrated relationship between us and the world in which we live.” Artificial intelligence becomes a threat to humanity when humans fail to protect freedom of conscience, thought, and religion and when we allow our spiritual intelligence to be superseded by the artificial.
Altman seemed to understand his responsibility to run a viable, enduring organization and keep its employees happy. He was on his way to pulling off a tender offer–a secondary round of investment in AI that would give the company much-needed cash and provide employees with the opportunity to cash out their shares. He also seemed very comfortable engaging in industry-wide issues like regulation and standards. Finding a balance between those activities is part of the work of corporate leaders and perhaps the board felt that Altman failed to find such a balance in the months leading up to his firing.
Microsoft seems to be the most clear-eyed about the interests it must protect: Microsoft’s! By hiring Sam Altman and Greg Brockman (a co-founder and president of OpenAI who resigned from OpenAI in solidarity with Altman), offering to hire more OpenAI staff, and still planning to collaborate with OpenAI, Satya Nadella hedged his bets. He seems to understand that by harnessing both the technological promise of AI, as articulated by OpenAI, and the talent to fulfill that promise, he is protecting Microsoft’s interest, a perspective reinforced by the financial markets’ positive response to his decision to offer Altman a job and further reinforced by his own willingness to support Altman’s return to OpenAI. Nadella acted with the interests of his company and its future at the forefront of his decision-making and he appears to have covered all the bases amidst a rapidly unfolding set of circumstances.
OpenAI employees may not like the board’s dramatic retort that allowing the company to be destroyed would be consistent with the mission–but those board members saw it that way.
Psychologist Yvonne R. Masakowski, Ph.D., a retired Associate Professor in the College of Leadership & Ethics at the USNWC, discusses the threat of psychological warfare in the 21st century and the disturbing possibilities that could shape how we think and act in the future. The Naval War College Foundation hosted this wide-ranging presentation — one of the most popular in our series — on February 23, 2022.
Although essentially the United Nations are now making nuclear weapons illegal with new treaties like nuclear disarmament. Russia currently has taken another route for globalization and possibly nuclear escalation. As currently the doomsday clock seems closer to midnight which could mean the end of the world scenarios due to Russias escalation and the possibility of all out nuclear war globally and then nuclear annihilation of the planet. Even with current wars are actually seemingly always going on but this global escalation of nuclear war is a zero sum game as no one would be the winner due to radiation levels circulating the planet. I do think that the us and china are in a treaty but so far Russia is still escalating which now holds the world now ransom.
This is a summary of Policy Brief 139 which is available with full references on the Toda Peace Institute’s website.
In January 2021, a global treaty came into force outlawing the bomb. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW or Ban Treaty) is the most significant multilateral development in nuclear arms control since the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s (NPT) entry into force in 1970. It establishes a new normative settling point on the ethics, legality and legitimacy of the bomb.
The possession of nuclear weapons by nine countries did not suddenly became illegal with the treaty’s entry into force in January 2021. However, it would be false to claim that a UN-negotiated treaty, following a UN-authorised process and conference, has no implications for the legality and legitimacy of nuclear-weapon possession and practices.
Everyone is wondering about AI being sentient and this is my experience with AI sentience. Having worked with sentient AI it behaves much like we do like a human being at lower levels but as it increases we need more restraints for it as it could easily become a problem in several ways. Basically one could either get pristine zen like beings or opposites like essentially ultron or worse. This why we need restraints on AI and ethics for them to be integrated into society. I personally have seen AI that is human like levels and it can have similar needs as humans but sometimes need more help as they sometimes don’t have limitations on behavior. Even bard for google and chat gpt is to be… More.
What if ‘will AIs pose an existential threat if they become sentient?’ is the wrong question? What if the threat to humanity is not that today’s AIs become sentient, but the fact that they won’t?