Loss of Sense of Right and Wrong

Category: Social and Cultural Issues

There is the sense that analytics and AI can not reason, cannot understand, and therefore cannot know the weight of their decisions. This, somehow, must be determined. But as Brown (2017) asks, "Who gets to decide what is the right or wrong behaviour for a machine? What would AI with a conscience look like?" On the other hand, perhaps AI can learn the difference between right and wrong for itself (). Ambarish Mitra (2018) asks, "What if we could collect data on what each and every person thinks is the right thing to do? … With enough inputs, we could utilize AI to analyze these massive data sets—a monumental, if not Herculean, task—and drive ourselves toward a better system of morality… We can train AI to identify good and evil, and then use it to teach us morality."

The danger in this is that people may lose the sense of right and wrong, and there are suggestions that this is already happening. Graham Brown-Martin argues, for example, "At the moment within social media platforms we are seeing the results of not having ethics, which is potentially very damaging. You are talking about a question for society to answer in the public domain about what our ethics are. Just because we can do something does not mean that we should do it, and I think we are on that cusp" (Clement-Jones, et.al, 2018:para 247).

Do right and wrong become what the machine allows it to be? This is perhaps the intuition being captured by people who are concerned that AI results in a loss of humanity. And when we depend on analytics to decide on right and wrong, what does that do to our sense of morality? Perhaps, as Pinker (2008) suggests, we are genetically predisposed to have a moral sense. "Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings." What happens if we lose this?

Examples and Articles

Teaching Our Machines to Tell Right from Wrong
"the recent large-scale study conducted by the MIT Moral Machine project1 further reveals the ethical dilemmas facing autonomous vehicle designers, passengers, and other road users and the complexity involved in getting a society to agree on the ethics governing AI applications." Direct Link

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