IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2017 - 29

Reflections
Keith Miller

Can We Program Ethics into AI?
At the IEEE 2016 Conference on
Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century, held in Melbourne, Australia,
July 13-15, 2016, Keith Miller
was asked to suggest questions
for a panel convened to discuss
the question, "Can we program
ethics into AI?" (Panel members
were Katina Michael (panel chair),
James J. Hughes, Greg Adamson,
Thao Phan, and Marcus Wigan.)
He wrote a dozen such questions,
and they are listed here.

Just for a moment, let's pretend
that under some clear definitions
and measurements that the answer
to this question is "Yes." I hope you
need not agree with that hypothetical in order to answer
a significantly different question: "if we CAN program
ethics into AI, SHOULD we?" That is, do you think
that it is absolutely established that AI making its
own ethical decisions is a good idea?

Returning now to the question "Can we program
ethics into AI?" let's pick apart some of the
inherent problems and assumptions inside
that question.
Whenever we establish a programming goal, good
software engineering principles require us to prepare

to test the resulting system to ascertain whether or not
that goal has (in all probability) been accomplished.
Can you envision a testing procedure that you would
find convincing as a demonstration that ethics has
been programmed into AI? If you were convinced by the
results of such a testing procedure, would you expect
that other interested parties will likely be convinced? If
you can't think of any such procedure, do you think the
enterprise of attempting to program ethics into AI is still
a practical goal?

Do you think the word "ethics" in our central question
is a static thing, or a dynamic thing?
That is, if an artificial intelligence exhibits ethics (e.g.,
ethical behavior or ethical reasoning) today, then

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2017.2697085
Date of publication: 8 June 2017

June 2017

ISTOCK

The title "Can we program
ethics into AI" has many
interesting aspects.

∕

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

29



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