Teaching an Algorithm to Understand Right and Wrong; Harvard Business Review, 11/15/16

Greg Satell, Harvard Business Review; Teaching an Algorithm to Understand Right and Wrong:

[Kip Currier: This thought-provoking Harvard Business Review article by Greg Satell marks the 1,000th post to this blog in 2016--more than I've posted in the entire previous 6 years since starting the Ethics blog in 2010. Anecdotally, and unsurprisingly, much of this year's posted corpus was plucked from the avalanche of ethics-related content generated via the most tumultuous Presidential Election in U.S. history. Ethics issues in Cyberhacking, Email and Social Media usage, Cyberbullying, Sexual Harassment, Diversity and Inclusion, Surveillance, Privacy, Censorship, "Truth" (Aside #1: Oxford Dictionaries recently declared "post-truth" the Word of the Year!), Fact-checking, Media responsibility, Self-driving cars (Aside #2: I passed an Uber test car on the way to the University of Pittsburgh campus this morning, giving a nod and a thumbs up to the two people sitting in the front seats of their metallic grey-hued autonomous vehicle wending the curves of Bigelow Boulevard's bluffs), and AI ethics provided a glut (and at times, like this summer, what felt like an unrelenting information-tsunami) of postable fodder. Last week's post-2016 election White-Hot-Topic, "Fake News"--with first-hand accounts of cringe-worthy click-incentivized content crafted by transparently unrepentant fake news scribes--remains a still-smoldering one for the blogosphere this week, vying with Conflicts of Interest for the #1 spot at the top. Or bottom, as it were. No risk in predicting that all of these thorny topics will continue to be dissected and debated in 2017. And that ethics issues--both in general and those with an information twist--are more relevant and wide-ranging than ever in our wired world. ]

"In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle states that it is a fact that “all knowledge and every pursuit aims at some good,” but then continues, “What then do we mean by the good?” That, in essence, encapsulates the ethical dilemma. We all agree that we should be good and just, but it’s much harder to decide what that entails.

Since Aristotle’s time, the questions he raised have been continually discussed and debated. From the works of great philosophers like Kant, Bentham, and Rawls to modern-day cocktail parties and late-night dorm room bull sessions, the issues are endlessly mulled over and argued about but never come to a satisfying conclusion.

Today, as we enter a “cognitive era” of thinking machines, the problem of what should guide our actions is gaining newfound importance. If we find it so difficult to denote the principles by which a person should act justly and wisely, then how are we to encode them within the artificial intelligences we are creating? It is a question that we need to come up with answers for soon."