Avast Blog_ViewPoints: Ethical AI requires ethical humans

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Can AI be evil? Garry Kasparov explains how AI works, and where ethics come into play.

Davos 2019, the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, took place in January in its namesake city of Switzerland. Unsurprisingly, AI emerged as one of the leading topics of discussion (with 40 sessions dedicated to it, second only to US-China trade). Most of the conversation, however, centered on articulating abstract principles about the importance of ethics in AI, or, at best, calls for collaboration and research in this area.

I do believe in the importance of expressing and debating the problems we will likely face as AI continues to grow in strength and scope. It will have an impact on the world beyond that of the internet—eventually. But we have reached a point where action is necessary, too, not just talk. Repeating high-minded principles without proposing concrete mechanisms for implementation or enforcement is a way for companies to superficially address the problem, while avoiding doing anything that impacts their bottom line. Ethics cannot be solely a publicity problem any more than security is.

Some of the points made at Davos echo sentiments I have expressed in the past and are useful as diagnoses of the impact AI could have on business and society. One view I’ve been expressing for years in the face of increasing dystopian, anti-tech sentiment, is that our technology is agnostic, which I was pleased to hear CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff emphasize. The question of how we integrate it into our world becomes all the more important when we acknowledge this fundamental characteristic. It will empower us tremendously, for good or evil, the way splitting the atom can generate useful energy or make a devastating bomb.

The abstract conversations in Davos often sounded like they believed we can create AI that is inherently good, or at least incapable of evil. This is much like believing we can raise human beings this way, an obvious fallacy. Of course, humans have free will and AI shows no signs of that, no matter how much autonomy we give them. But ethics aren’t chess. We can’t trivially design machines that are more ethical than we are the way a programmer can create a chess program that is far better at chess than they are. One key is to use them to reveal our human biases so we can improve ourselves and our society in a positive cycle.

The admission is only a starting point. Chief executives and policy leaders must use this understanding to adapt their practices—and hiring a chief ethical and humane officer, as Salesforce recently did, is a welcome gesture. Ideally, ethical behavior is also profitable, but if it’s not, it must be enforced—the very definition of law—and enforcement is what the companies dread.

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