Princeton collaboration brings new insights to the ethics of artificial intelligence; Princeton University, January 14, 2019

Molly Sharlach, Office of Engineering Communications, Princeton University; Princeton collaboration brings new insights to the ethics of artificial intelligence

"Should machines decide who gets a heart transplant? Or how long a person will stay in prison?

The growing use of artificial intelligence in both everyday life and life-altering decisions brings up complex questions of fairness, privacy and accountability. Surrendering human authority to machines raises concerns for many people. At the same time, AI technologies have the potential to help society move beyond human biases and make better use of limited resources.

“Princeton Dialogues on AI and Ethics” is an interdisciplinary research project that addresses these issues, bringing engineers and policymakers into conversation with ethicists, philosophers and other scholars. At the project’s first workshop in fall 2017, watching these experts get together and share ideas was “like nothing I’d seen before,” said Ed Felten, director of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). “There was a vision for what this collaboration could be that really locked into place.”

The project is a joint venture of CITP and the University Center for Human Values, which serves as “a forum that convenes scholars across the University to address questions of ethics and value” in diverse settings, said director Melissa Lane, the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics. Efforts have included a public conference, held in March 2018, as well as more specialized workshops beginning in 2017 that have convened experts to develop case studies, consider questions related to criminal justice, and draw lessons from the study of bioethics.

“Our vision is to take ethics seriously as a discipline, as a body of knowledge, and to try to take advantage of what humanity has understood over millennia of thinking about ethics, and apply it to emerging technologies,” said Felten, Princeton’s Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs. He emphasized that the careful implementation of AI systems can be an opportunity “to achieve better outcomes with less bias and less risk. It’s important not to see this as an entirely negative situation.”"