Essay on Ethics and Ethical Problems of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad term that encompasses several areas, including computer science, business, engineering, biology, psychology, mathematics, statistics, logic, philosophy, and linguistics. AI is unique and contentious due to its complexity and power (Siau, 2018). AI can be divided into two types: weak AI and strong AI. In contrast to weak AI, which can only process certain tasks, researchers from several areas are working together to develop strong AI (artificial general intelligence), which will be capable of processing multiple tasks with human-like intelligence. Researchers are concerned that general AI would lead to superintelligence (Müller and Bostrom, 2016), which might be loosely defined as “any intellect that substantially exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in almost all sectors of interest” (Mulgan, T., 2016).

Humans have now created artificial life that can execute simple tasks utilizing artificial intelligence technology. With the advancement of technology, more complex artificial life will be born and evolve, eventually producing human-like emotions and 'humanity'. At that moment, we must decide if they have rights and whether – and when – they are entitled to the same rights, freedoms, and protections as humans (Li, H.Y., An, J.T. and Zhang, Y., 2021). The idea is that the more advanced AI becomes, the more risks it will pose to humans. For example, AI may bring mass unemployment, make decisions that people do not comprehend or control, lead to wealth redistribution, and finally replace humans (Siau and Wang, 2018).

Ethics is a difficult, intricate, and perplexing topic. Even the definitions of ethics demand their own article. The goal of this paper is not to define its concept; rather, it is to review relevant literature, obtain a broader overview of what are the perceived ethical and moral issues related to AI, and collect expert opinions on how ethical and moral issues related to AI can be studied, analyzed, and addressed. Because AI has been used in so many different industries, it is impossible to research AI ethics in all contexts.

Ethical Issues with AI

As AI advances and becomes more sophisticated, there may be opportunities as well as challenges in various domains such as employment, law enforcement, medical, defense warfare systems, and transportation. Machines are gaining the ability to gauge, detect, understand, and interact with human emotions as affective computing, machine learning, and AI improves (McStay, 2020).

At the moment, AI is referred to as narrow AI or weak AI. It is effective in a narrow and specialized domain. The performance of narrow AI is heavily reliant on training data and programming, both of which are strongly tied to big data and humans. Thus, the ethical challenges of Narrow AI incorporate human factors. “A separate set of ethical difficulties emerges when we consider the prospect that some future AI systems may be candidates for moral status” (Bostrom and Yudkowsky, 2014).

According to this viewpoint, once AI obtains moral status, we should regard it as an object with equal rights to humans rather than a machine system. The research on ethical issues in AI is divided into three categories: AI features that may give birth to ethical problems (Timmermans et al. 2010), human aspects that produce ethical hazards (Larson 2017), and methods to teach AI systems to be ethical (Allen et al. 2006; Anderson and Anderson 2007).