Artificial Intelligence and Public Trust

The future is here. With the exploding commercial market for high-powered, cloud-computing AI services provided by the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, the reach of artificial intelligence technologies is virtually unlimited. What does this mean for humans? How will we adapt to a world in which we increasingly find ourselves in economic, creative, and cognitive competition with machines? Will we embrace these new technologies with the same fervor as we embraced televisions and smartphones? Will we trust them? Should we trust them

The Future of Military Virtue: Autonomous Systems and the Moral Deskilling of the Military

Autonomous systems, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), anti-munitions systems, armed robots, cyber attack and cyber defense systems, are projected to become the centerpiece of 21st century military and counter-terrorism operations. This trend has challenged legal experts, policymakers and military ethicists to make sense of these developments within existing normative frameworks of international law and just war theory. This paper highlights a different yet equally profound ethical challenge: understanding how this trend may lead to a moral deskilling of the military profession, potentially destabilizing traditional norms of military virtue and their power to motivate ethical restraint in the conduct of war. Employing the normative framework of virtue ethics, I argue that professional ideals of military virtue such as courage, integrity, honor and compassion help to distinguish legitimate uses of military force from amoral, criminal or mercenary violence, while also preserving the conception of moral community needed to secure a meaningful peace in war’s aftermath. The cultivation of these virtues in a human being, however, presupposes repeated practice and development of skills of moral analysis, deliberation and action, especially in the ethical use of force. As in the historical deskilling of other professions, human practices critical to cultivating these skills can be made redundant by autonomous or semi-autonomous machines, with a resulting devaluation and/or loss of these skills and the virtues they facilitate. This paper explores the circumstances under which automated methods of warfare, including automated weapons and cyber systems, could lead to a dangerous ‘moral deskilling’ of the military profession. I point out that this deskilling remains a significant risk even with a commitment to ‘human on the loop’ protocols. I conclude by summarizing the potentially deleterious consequences of such an outcome, and reflecting on possible strategies for its prevention

Introduction: Envisioning the good life In the 21st century and beyond

In May 2014 cosmologist Stephen Hawking, computer scientist Stuart Russell, and physicists Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek published an open letter in the UK news outlet The Independent, sounding the alarm about the grave risks to humanity posed by emerging technologies of artificial intelligence. They invited readers to imagine these technologies outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. The authors note that while the successful creation of artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to bring huge benefits to our world, and would undoubtedly be the biggest event in human history ... it might also be the last. Hawking echoed the warning later that year, telling the BBC that unrestricted AI development could spell the end of the human race. While some AI enthusiasts dismiss such warnings as fearmongering hype, celebrated high-tech inventors Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and thousands of AI and robotics researchers have joined the chorus of voices calling for wiser and more effective human oversight of these new technologies. How worried should we be? More importantly: what should we do? AI is only one of many emerging technologies-from genome editing and 3D printing to a globally networked Internet of Things -shaping a future unparalleled in human history in its promise and its peril. Are we up to the challenge this future presents? If not, how can we get there? How can htmlans hope to live well in a world made increasingly more complex and unpredictable by emerging technologies? Though it will require the remainder of the book to fully respond to that question, in essence my answer is this: we need to cultivate in ow-selves, collectively, a special kind of moral character, one that expresses what I will call the technomoral virtues

Artificial Intelligence and the Ethics of Self-learning Robots

The convergence of robotics technology with the science of artificial intelligence ( or AI) is rapidly enabling the development of robots that emulate a wide range of intelligent human behaviors.1 Recent advances in machine learning techniques have produced significant gains in the ability of artificial agents to perform or even excel in activities formerly thought to be the exclusive province of human intelligence, including abstract problem-solving, perceptual recognition, social interaction, and natural language use. These developments raise a host of new ethical concerns about the responsible design, manufacture, and use of robots enabled with artificial intelligence-particularly those equipped with self-learning capacities. The potential public benefits of self-learning robots are immense. Driverless cars promise to vastly reduce human fatalities on the road while boosting transportation efficiency and reducing energy use. Robot medics with access to a virtual ocean of medical case data might one day be able to diagnose patients with far greater speed and reliability than even the best-trained human counterparts. Robots tasked with crowd control could predict the actions of a dangerous mob well before the signs are recognizable to law enforcement officers. Such applications, and many more that will emerge, have the potential to serve vital moral interests in protecting human life, health, and well-being. Yet as this chapter will show, the ethical risks posed by AI-enabled robots are equally serious-especially since self-learning systems behave in ways that cannot always be anticipated or folly understood, even by their programmers. Some warn of a future where Al escapes our control, or even turns against humanity (Standage 2016); but other, far less cinematic dangers are much nearer to hand and are virtually certain to cause great harms if not promptly addressed by technologists, lawmakers, and ocher stakeholders. The task of ensuring the ethical design, manufacture, use, and governance of AI-enabled robots and other artificial agents is thus as critically important as it is vast

Super Soldiers: The Ethical, Legal and Operational Implications (Part 2)

This is the second chapter of two on military human enhancement. In the first chapter, the authors outlined past and present efforts aimed at enhancing the minds and bodies of our warfighters with the broader goal of creating the “super soldiers” of tomorrow, all before exploring a number of distinctions—natural vs. artificial, external vs. internal, enhancement vs. therapy, enhancement vs. disenhancement, and enhancement vs. engineering—that are critical to the definition of military human enhancement and understanding the problems it poses. The chapter then advanced a working definition of enhancement as efforts that aim to “improve performance, appearance, or capability besides what is necessary to achieve, sustain, or restore health.” It then discussed a number of variables that must be taken into consideration when applying this definition in a military context. In this second chapter, drawing on that definition and some of the controversies already mentioned, the authors set out the relevant ethical, legal, and operational challenges posed by military enhancement. They begin by considering some of the implications for international humanitarian law and then shift to US domestic law. Following that, the authors examine military human enhancement from a virtue ethics approach, and finally outline some potential consequences for military operations more generally

Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting

The 21st century offers a dizzying array of new technological developments: robots smart enough to take white collar jobs, social media tools that manage our most important relationships, ordinary objects that track, record, analyze and share every detail of our daily lives, and biomedical techniques with the potential to transform and enhance human minds and bodies to an unprecedented degree. Emerging technologies are reshaping our habits, practices, institutions, cultures and environments in increasingly rapid, complex and unpredictable ways that create profound risks and opportunities for human flourishing on a global scale. How can our future be protected in such challenging and uncertain conditions? How can we possibly improve the chances that the human family will not only live, but live well, into the 21st century and beyond? This book locates a key to that future in the distant past: specifically, in the philosophical traditions of virtue ethics developed by classical thinkers from Aristotle and Confucius to the Buddha. Each developed a way of seeking the good life that equips human beings with the moral and intellectual character to flourish even in the most unpredictable, complex and unstable situations--precisely where we find ourselves today. Through an examination of the many risks and opportunities presented by rapidly changing technosocial conditions, Vallor makes the case that if we are to have any real hope of securing a future worth wanting, then we will need more than just better technologies. We will also need better humans. Technology and the Virtues develops a practical framework for seeking that goal by means of the deliberate cultivation of technomoral virtues: specific skills and strengths of character, adapted to the unique challenges of 21st century life, that offer the human family our best chance of learning to live wisely and well with emerging technologies.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1194/thumbnail.jp

Frege’s Puzzle: A Phenomenological Solution

Despite the great promise and intellectual rigor of its founding, in recent years the dominant influence of the analytic tradition in Anglo-American philosophy has begun to weaken. While it remains a rich source of excellent scholarship, the remarkable achievements that distinguished the movement in the early part of the twentieth century have not been matched by more contemporary efforts to build upon those successes. Furthermore, the bulk of the aforementioned scholarship has been devoted to trying to untangle the nest of logical difficulties encountered by their forerunners, with comparatively little to offer in the way of fresh insight. As a consequence, Anglo-American philosophy is gradually drifting away from the traditional analytic approach into pragmatic or post-modern alternatives, or more recently, ceding its ground to cognitive science