AI Ethics

"This book is by a philosopher. It’s very clear, and he knows what he’s talking about. He sets out a map of the problems. It covers issues like the problem of superintelligence. That’s the predicted moment when there is an intelligence explosion, and AI becomes smarter than we are. When it works on itself and improves itself until we become superfluous. The worry is that if we become superfluous, this AI might not care about us. Or it might be totally indifferent to us, and maybe it will even obliterate us. How do we make sure that we design AI so that we have value alignment, and we’re still in the picture? So that’s one classic problem in AI. Another one is privacy and surveillance. Another one is the problem of unexplainable decisions and black box algorithms, where we don’t exactly know how they work and what precisely they are inferring and with what data. The book covers challenges for policymakers, including the challenges posed by changes to the climate. It’s a kind of taster: a very short, compact survey, academic but very accessible. Then there is another book I want to mention in passing called Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford . That one fulfils a similar purpose in that it mentions many of the biggest problems with AI and tech. But it does so from a very interesting perspective, and that is the material sustenance and composition of AI. It’s about what these machines are made of and who makes them. It’s about the mines that are used to extract the metals necessary to build phones and to build data servers and so on. The main thesis of the book is that artificial intelligence is neither artificial—because it actually depends on the natural environment—nor is it genuine intelligence. This book is very well-tuned to problems of power, and how AI gets used to enhance power asymmetries that are worrisome for labour rights and civil rights. It doesn’t have many proposals. In my view, that’s something that’s missing from most books in this area, and it’s something that I tried to redress in Privacy Is Power . Yes. It’s a handbook with 36 chapters, written by philosophers, but not only for philosophers: it also aspires to be a source of information for people working in computer science, law, sociology, surveillance studies, media studies and anthropology. It covers a wide range of topics, including free speech and social media, predictive policing, sex robots, the future of democracy, cybersecurity, friendship online, the future of work, medical AI, the ethics of adblocking, how robots have politics. It’s very, very broad. When I first had the idea to do this book, very few philosophers were working on AI ethics or digital ethics. I was very frustrated that philosophers weren’t producing more given the importance of the topic. In a matter of a few years, that has dramatically changed. There are so many papers coming out now, so many people getting interested. Hopefully, this book will be a text that can help academics and students get a map of the most important philosophical problems in the digital ethics field."