The New York Times; This Is How We Get Moral A.I. Companies
"Artificial intelligence can be wondrous, but the technology underneath is more than a little monstrous. It eats up all the words in the world, from blogs to books, often without permission. It burns whole forests’ worth of energy, digesting that raw material into its models, and gulps billions of gallons of water to cool down. These are the same qualities we perceive in Godzilla, but distributed. Is it any wonder that the Japanese word “kaiju,” or strange beast, has “AI” smack in the middle?...
The entire culture of American technology is built around two terms: disruption and, of course, scale. But ethics are constraints on disruption and scale. Truly ethics-bound organizations — the U.S. justice system, the American Medical Association, the Catholic priesthood — have hard scaling limits. Their rules run deep, and their requirements to serve are so onerous that only a few people can do the job. Punishments for transgressors include losing their licenses, being defrocked and being disbarred. Software industry people might have good degrees and are often good people, but they are making it up as they go along. They take no oath, are inconsistently certified and can only be fired, not exiled from the trade."
