Responsibility

Category: Social and Cultural Issues

With respect to the second, while it may be intuitive to argue that human designers and owners ought to take responsibility for the actions of an AI, arguments have been advanced suggesting that autonomous agents are responsible in their own right, thereby possibly absolving humans of blame. "While other forms of automation and algorithmic decision making have existed for some time, emerging AI technologies can place further distance between the result of an action and the actor who caused it, raising questions about who should be held liable and under what circumstances. These principles call for reliable resolutions to those questions." (Fjeld, et.al., 2020:34)

The argument from AI autonomy has a variety of forms. In one, advanced (tentatively) by the IEEE. It draws the distinction between 'moral agents' and 'moral patients' (or 'moral subjects') to suggest that we ought to distinguish between how an outcome occurred, and the consequence of that outcome, and suggests that autonomous self-organizing systems may operate independently of the intent of the designer (IEEE, 2016, p. 196) As Bostrom and Yubkowsky (2029) write, "The local, specific behavior of the AI may not be predictable apart from its safety,even if the programmers do everything right." It may seem unjust to hold designers responsible in such cases.

There is the expectation that systems of the future will be able to sense their environment, plan based on that environment, and act upon that environment with the intent of reaching some task-specific goal (either given to or created by the system) without external control. Beer, et.al. (2014) take this description to define autonomy. "Autonomy is a critical construct related to human-robot interaction (HRI) and varies widely across robot platforms. Levels of robot autonomy (LORA), ranging from teleoperation to fully autonomous systems, influence the way in which humans and robots interact with one another."

Examples and Articles

New human-machine relationships
A short review of "Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation" by Kevin Roose "AI is everywhere. Jobs are being automated. Algorithms run our life. What are you doing about it?" and "We need to be realistic about what AI can and can't do, and be really careful before we start turning important tasks over to machines that might not be ready to handle them." Direct Link

Digital Citizenship Toolkit
Have you ever wondered if your phone is listening to you? Do you ever look to the Internet for the answer to a question, and hours later, find that you are more confused than before? Have you argued with a friend or relative about a meme? Have you been tempted to share your own thoughts and feelings online, but resisted for fear of trolls? This book delves into these issues and more. Direct Link

AI responsibility: Taming the algorithm
"We've reached a point where human (cognitive) task performance is being leveraged or even replaced by AI. So who or what is responsible for what this AI does?" Direct Link

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