You\u2019re riding along in your driverless car when suddenly a group of five people step off the footpath and into the path of your car.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no time for the car to stop.<\/p>\n
It can veer violently off the road, potentially rendering the passenger dead.<\/p>\n
Or it can plough through the group, potentially causing five fatalities.<\/p>\n
What should the driverless car do?<\/p>\n
Or should the question be, what does the car\u2019s programmer tell the car it should do?<\/p>\n
And who tells the programmer what to do?<\/p>\n
Each question on ethics in the era of artificial intelligence (AI) seems to raise another.<\/p>\n
Professor Liz Bacon is the Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor in the Faculty of Architecture, Computing and Humanities at the University of Greenwich in the UK. She also has a PhD in artificial intelligence, and is a Past Chair of the British Computer Society.<\/p>\n
Speaking at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Melbourne last week, Bacon said those debating AI laws need to wade through a myriad of complex questions.<\/p>\n
In the driverless car example above, Bacon says the AI programmed into the car needs to replace the thinking a human would do in the same situation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese days, as a driver, you have to make a split-second decision, but [for autonomous vehicles], you\u2019re going to have to program that algorithm to say what are the consequences. What do you do in a situation where there is no choice but somebody has to be harmed?<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could do it on straight numbers. The car could say \u2018I\u2019m going to veer off the road and kill the person in my own vehicle \u2014 and I\u2019m going to save those five people on the road.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cOr you could do it, depending on what the AI of the car knows, on the value of the people to society. Say the person in the car happens to have the cure to cancer, and that the five people are escapees from jail.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe you say their value to society is worth less, so maybe you say \u2018I\u2019m going to save the person in the car\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are horrendous implications there, if you were to actually consider the value of people to society.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you have a computer that can do split-second look-ups, autonomous cars have all sorts of knowledge of who\u2019s around them to make that actual decision. It\u2019s scary to think about how you program that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the question of if you program the algorithm to say \u2018kill these people over that person\u2019, could that be considered by a court to be pre-meditated murder?<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are really huge ethical and societal questions that we are going to have to make when people are building autonomous cars,\u201d said Bacon.<\/p>\n
Bacon said the government of the day needs to step up and tackle the hard questions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen governments catch up \u2014 and I don\u2019t think they have; their legislation tends to be behind reality \u2013 I think they need to try and put some laws and some legislation into place.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe actual fine-tuning of decisions could be made at company level, at a mid-level managerial level, it could be done at the actual level of the programmer \u2013 and that\u2019s where we have issues of potential bias coming in, which could be conscious bias or unconscious bias.\u201d<\/p>\n
When it\u2019s your job to program autonomous cars, you may disagree with the company line on how an autonomous car should handle different situations on the road.<\/p>\n
Would you feel comfortable programming a car to kill pedestrians to protect a car\u2019s occupants at all costs?<\/p>\n
\u201cBias can creep in at any level of the production,\u201d said Bacon.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone has their own sense of right and wrong, and their own personal threshold about what they feel they are able to engage with.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt can be very difficult if you\u2019re under pressure, you don\u2019t want to lose your job, and you\u2019ve got your boss pressuring you to do something you\u2019re not comfortable with. When are you going to walk? When are you going to whistle-blow? Are you going to be the next Edward Snowden?\u201d<\/p>\n
Hacking into an autonomous car isn\u2019t as far-fetched as it sounds. In the US, hackers have been able to successfully hack into cars<\/a> and change their behaviour, including hitting the brakes.<\/p>\n \u201cAcross the world, artificial intelligence can do massive, massive good.<\/p>\n \u201cBut the sad thing is that there are people out there that want to harm us, who are unscrupulous and unethical.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you wanted to kill someone, you could hack into their car and theoretically have it drive off a cliff or into a wall,\u201d said Bacon. \u201cYou could make it look like an accident.\u201d<\/p>\n Bacon said that while there will continue to be deaths on our roads, the move to autonomous cars will lead to overall fewer deaths, and that they will be \u201cdifferent types\u201d of deaths.<\/p>\n \u201cThe human driver may have killed Person A but the autonomous car may have killed Person B because their algorithm is different.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to autonomous cars, Bacon added AI will infiltrate other areas, such as battle zones.<\/p>\n \u201cIt won\u2019t be long before we stop sending people into wars,\u201d she said. \u201cWe send drones, we send robots, we send bombs. People are remotely controlling robots doing the fighting. That\u2019s the reality, that\u2019s where it\u2019s going.<\/p>\n \u201cIn that sense, it\u2019s better that people aren\u2019t potentially getting killed on the front line anymore when we have robots that can do that. It changes the nature of war, it changes the nature of decision-making.\u201d<\/p>\n Who does one sue when a relative gets killed by an autonomous car?<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a biggie,\u201d says Bacon, \u201cAnd I do think that\u2019s where we need government help in terms of legislation because that\u2019s a really, really hard question. There\u2019s some discussion about suing the robots, although I don\u2019t really understand how that works because robots don\u2019t have bank accounts and money to pay people. There\u2019s the organization that developed it, there\u2019s the programmer \u2013 there\u2019s going to be a whole bunch of stakeholders, and I really don\u2019t have the answer.<\/p>\n \u201cBut insurance companies are going to have to have the answer because when things crash, they have to know who\u2019s at fault. That\u2019s a big issue and may well slow down the release of autonomous cars onto roads.<\/p>\n Not many people yet understand the implications of having autonomous vehicles on roads, and it\u2019s an education process that needs to begin as the technology is being developed.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the whole of society needs the education now so they can understand what AI is, and the impact on life,\u201d said Bacon.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat it means, what it can do, what it\u2019s potential for society is \u2013 the good and the bad \u2013 so that they are better qualified to make their own judgement.\u201d<\/p>\n Above all, said Bacon, people need to have absolute certainty in the systems.<\/p>\n \u201cTrust is going to be key,\u201d she said. \u201cPeople bringing out autonomous cars are not going to sell anything unless people actually trust the technology.\u201d<\/p>\n Source: Information Age<\/a><\/p>\nI want to sue<\/h2>\n
Ignorance is bliss<\/h2>\n