A recent installment of The Inquiry asked “Can we teach robots ethics”? The discussion in the episode provides some really interesting food for thought. Anyway, it reminded me that, for a while, I’ve wanted to write about something that troubles me in discussions of AI, and particularly military AI uses: The idea that coding ethics is either possible or desirable.
This is a fairly quick stab at the topic, and is mainly framed around Arkin’s Governing Lethal Behaviour from 2008. It’s in no way intended to be an exhaustive treatment of the topic – or indeed, of Arkin’s work… But hopefully, this kind of criticism can generate useful further discussion.
This is Part One. Part Two to follow.
The scene is generally seen as depicting a typical mix of tragic stoicism and, perhaps unusually, a consciously anti-war sentiment.
This week I am off to Hanover to a meeting on genome editing and biosecurity. I intend post some of my notes on this event over the next few days.
Below is a poster on misuse concerns; something which paticipants were asked to put together. Hopefully this will be useful to newcomers in this area.