Book Review: “AI Ethics,” by Mark Coeckelbergh
Explores the moral, spiritual, and philosophical side of AI.
For those who envision a future of AI to bring about a dystopian, barren landscape world run by robots with absolutely no use for humans, reading AI Ethics by Mark Coeckelbergh should be a breath of fresh air. Not that this book will relieve you of all of your worries about our future, but a least it gives a somber, pragmatic look at the possibilities of how AI will mold the future of humankind.
Coeckelbergh, a Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the Philosophy Department at the University of Vienna, gives a clear-headed view of AI that is both hopeful and yet still scary when you consider that our future depends on the applications this technology will be used for. We must trust ourselves and the future population to use the technology that would be in the best interest of ourselves and the world.
Intuition and strategic thinking used to be the roadblocks AI had to overcome. But that is no longer the case. Instead of simple mathematical algorithms (which is enough to beat 99% of the earth’s population in strategy games), computers beat humans by means of machine learning based on millions of chess and Go game matches in which the computers play themselves to learn. Programmers prepare the data sets and create the algorithms, but they are ignorant of how computers come up with answers. This, of course, is a concern that Coeckelbergh revisits several times in his book.
One of the ethical questions that the book tackles are the now familiar, “Would a self-driving car protect its passengers or pedestrians if forced to make a decision, or should we even make robots that are fully automated to kill? Part of the answer that Coeckelbergh addresses is we do not even know who is responsible when things go wrong; is it the manufacturers of the equipment, the organizations that use it, or the programmers? Responsibility for the technology needs to be clarified, yet the technology continues to move in the direction of fully automated processes and decision-making.
AI Ethics is about technological change and its impact on society. Who does AI benefit: the police, military, healthcare systems, law, government, and businesses? Or, in the long run, does it benefit the machine itself? There’s the idea that super-intelligent machines will surpass human intelligence. This idea is a fire that recently had gasoline poured on it the last couple of months with the introduction of DALL-E 2, an AI system that can create images based on descriptions in natural language, and ChatGPT, a chatbot that can answer questions, write essays, and write poems better than most people I know. This makes this book even more timely as educators desperately try to distinguish between human efforts and computer-generated papers, documents, and essays.
This book also makes an interesting comparison with religion, which is concerned with human transcendence, with advanced AI, which is also concerned about human transcendence, and points to a time in the future when the mind will be uploaded, freeing us from our bodies, skin, and bone, to tiny burst of energy traveling at the speed of light through a network. One of the more critical aspects of the book is how bias is inserted into the system. Can a totally unbiased algorithm be made? A decision is a moral stance. AI makes decisions all the time. We cannot expect or depend on algorithms to make sound ethical decisions.
In the end, Coeckelbergh points out that our big problems, such as climate change, for instance, will need to be solved with a combination of abstract intelligence, both with humans and AI. And if we use practical and concrete wisdom, we can improve our world. If we have ideas about turning Mars into a livable planet, why not use the same AI technology to make our planet habitable first? That would be much easier. This is an intelligent book by a person that is a philosopher, not a technophile or a Luddite, and I recommend this book for its straight and unbiased ideas and opinions of what our future can become.
