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The Ethics of AI: Navigating the Moral Landscape

The moral landscape of the future, where AI permeates social life, will be a complex and nuanced one. As AI evolves into increasingly anthropomorphized systems that are part of our daily lives, the complexities of moral decision-making will grow exponentially as well. This book seeks to elucidate the underlying complexities of such decisions using thoughtful examples and accurate technical insights in a style that is both intellectually stimulating and accessible to the lay reader.

As such, the book provides a framework for thinking about ethical issues in the field of AI. It highlights a set of normative objectives—including accountability, explainability, privacy, and justice—and discusses how they relate to the overall moral values of the human world. It identifies key challenges and opportunities for ethics in the field of AI and makes a number of recommendations.

Some of the challenges in the field of AI are well known, including the need for more transparency and the need to consider the long-term consequences of technology use (Roberts and Yin 2017). Other challenges, however, are less widely understood or debated. For example, there are few discussions of the potential abuse of anthropomorphized agents—such as robots or language assistants—or of the risk that such anthropomorphization might lead to the abuse of people through violence against them. There are also few discussions of the ethical implications of the trolley problem and fewer still of the broader issues of the "hidden" social and ecological costs of AI.

Another issue technology has change over the year is that of apportioning responsibility to AI systems. This is a highly complex issue, and there are several competing perspectives on this topic. Some argue that since AI systems are creations of human ingenuity and product of code, they should bear some of the responsibility for their actions and decisions, whereas others point to the fact that AI systems might suffer from biases in their training data or blind spots, and that it is not reasonable to hold them responsible for all of the decisions they make.

A third issue is the need for more diversity in the fields of AI and robotics. The prevailing gender imbalance in these fields is an embarrassment and needs to be addressed. This requires a major shift from the largely utilitarian approach of existing guidelines to more of a virtue ethics (Gilligan 1982).

Finally, there is a need for more focus on ethics in the design and development of AI and technology website robotics systems. This requires an exploration of the ethical implications of the ways in which data is generated, recorded, curated, analyzed, disseminated, shared, and used (Bruin and Floridi 2017), of the ways algorithms are designed (Kitchin and Dodge 2011), and of the ways AI systems are taught to perform tasks (Gebru et al. 2019). Ideally, this work will help guide the development of these new technologies toward more ethical and safer ends.