IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016 - 23

Cruz, this value originates "in
the fact of existing." In the context of AI, this mirrors the questions of human consciousness.
Does an autonomous machine
deserve rights typically afforded
a human just because they
exist? That would mean Google's
self-driving cars or militarized AI
robots should be given those
rights today. Or would a machine
have to fool the Turing test to
gain its rights so at least thirty
percent of the humans giving
the test felt it was a person? Or
perhaps the machine would
need to be self-aware enough to
know it exists to gain these
rights, like the androids in Philip
K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep, the basis for the
cult classic film, Blade Runner.
Whatever the case, the notion of
a "human person" may soon be
outdated or considered bigotry.
So defining specific human
qualities for AI ethics today is of
paramount importance.
2) A Value that Did Not Originate
in the Decision of a Worldly
Power. Whereas the value of a
human person may originate outside of the context of any particular worldly power, autonomous
machines are currently being
created in multiple countries and
jurisdictions around the world.
This means any AI ethics standards would have to account for
multicultural views about the
nature of their existence. As
always, the element of money
clouds these issues, as there's
such an opportunity for profit in
the field of robotics and AI in the
coming years. This means we
need to separate the notion of
Value as profit from Values as
human/moralistic guidelines.
3) To Fully Develop One's Personality. This phrase from 1948
is helpful regarding its specificity
DECEmber 2016

about a universal value. If it's
possible to provide an environment where people could live
free from want and oppression,
Santa Cruz felt it was an inalienable right for those people to fully
develop their personality. Applied
to an algorithm, would this tenet
again infer programs should be
left alone to develop autonomously outside of regulation? Or,
as I believe, will the potential
presence of multiple or even universal algorithms in our lives prevent us from naturally developing
our human personalities?
While my initial vision for this
chapter was to create an "Artificial
Intelligence Ethics Manifesto," I've
come to realize it's impossible to
simply provide a list of ten rules
for all AI programmers to follow to
ensure human values are imbued
into robots and machines. We need a
new Universal Declaration of Human
Rights created in the context of how
we're going to live with autonomous
machines. And while any declaration along these lines wouldn't be
focused on mandating morals per
se, they would reflect the moralistic ideas of the people who created
them.

Difficulties in the Design
In my interview for this book with
Kate Darling, Research Specialist at
M.I.T. Media lab, we spoke a great
deal about the issue of ethics in AI
programming. Her legal expertise
and background in social robotics
makes her particularly suited to
understand the difficulties involved
in creating standards for a field as
vast as AI. One of the greatest challenges she points out is how siloed
academia can be regarding other
disciplines within the same institution and the world at large:
This isn't the fault of anyone
building the robots. The message
(within academia) is, "We don't want
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

to restrict innovation. Let people
build this stuff, then people doing
the social sciences should work out
the regulation after it exists." After
I worked at M.I.T. for a while, I realized there are very simple design
decisions that can be made early
on that set standards for later on
that are very hard to change. You
want people building these robots
to at least have privacy and security in the back of their minds. But
you bring these things up to them,
and they often say, "Oh, I should
have thought about that." It's a general problem that the disciplines are
too siloed off from each other and
there's no cross-pollination.
Providing the cross-pollination
Darling mentions is a much simpler
solution to tackle regarding AI ethics than creating a Universal Standard of some kind. Fortunately,
these issues have taken on a greater
prominence since revered figures
like Elon Musk and Steven Hawking
have expressed concerns [4] over
AI that have gained attention in the
mainstream press.
Organizations within the AI industry have also tackled ethical issues
for years, and in January of 2015, the
Association for the Advancement of
Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) [5] even
held its First International Workshop
on AI and Ethics [6] in Austin, TX.
Titles for talks at the event directly
addressed issues of ethics, like the
one presented by Michael and Susan
Leigh Anderson, Towards Ensuring Ethical Behavior from Autonomous Systems: A Case-Supported
Principle-Based Paradigm [7]. The
Anderson's hypothesis focuses on
gaining the consensus of groups of
ethicists regarding scenarios where
autonomous systems are likely to be
used. Similar to the idea of observing human behavior as I wrote about
for the fictional company Moralign,
the Anderson's proposal makes a
great deal of sense as they point out

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