IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016 - 22

commentary

John C. Havens

Updating a
Declaration

It appears that humanity's great challenge for this century is to extend
cooperative human values and institutions to autonomous technology
for the greater good.
-Steve Omohundro,
Autonomous Technology and
The Greater Human Good [1]
ensors and data have
the capacity to easily
overtake control of
our lives. In any situation, we'll soon be
able to analyze the emotions, facial
expressions, or data about someone we're interacting with in business and social situations. While
there will be great knowledge in
this new cultural landscape, there's
also great opportunity for emotional
paralysis. How do you talk to someone when every word and emotion is
analyzed? How do you form relationships of trust when you're worried
about every thought and response?
If we don't evolve values outside the
context of this type of surveillance,
our tracked words and actions will
form the basis for preferences leading to a homogenized humanity.
This is why values play such an
essential role in the creation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). If we can't
identify the human values we hold
dear, we can't program them into
our machines. Values don't just
provide perspective on a person's
life - they provide specificity. What

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2618777
Date of publication: 12 December 2016

morals do you feel are absolute?
What spiritual, mental, or emotional
qualities drive your actions?
If we were to create Humanity's
Manifesto, what would it be? How
can we codify such a treatise on
human values to capture it for other
people's use?
One idea would be to model an
Artificial Intelligence Ethics Protocol after something like The United
Nations' Universal Declaration of
Human Rights [2]. Adopted in 1948,
the Declaration came about after the
experience of the Second World War
where the international community
came together to try and guarantee
universal rights of individuals. The
process took almost two years, and
contains Articles that could certainly be emulated for AI Values, such
as, "everyone has the right to life,
liberty, and security of person." Or,
"No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment."
Where these values become difficult to implement, however, is
their lack of clarity on specifics.
For instance, how should we define
"liberty" with regard to programming
machines? Would that infer allowing
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freedom for an autonomous program
to iterate on its own, outside the confines of existing laws? Or does it refer
to a machine's human operators,
who must retain "liberty" of control
over machines? As another example,
what's "degrading" for a machine?
Porn? Insider trading schemes?
Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, a
member of the drafting sub-Committee had a response to the adoption of the Declaration that's quite
fascinating to reflect on regarding
Artificial Intelligence and ethics:
I perceived clearly that I was
participating in a truly significant historic event in which a
consensus had been reached
as to the supreme value of the
human person, a value that did
not originate in the decision of
a worldly power, but rather in
the fact of existing - which
gave rise to the inalienable
right to live free from want and
oppression and to fully develop
one's personality [3].

Let's unpack this a bit.
1) The Supreme Value of a Human
Person. According to Santa
∕

DECEmber 2016

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