IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016 - 25

Crowdsourcing Control

not what I mean. I want you to make
paper clips in the context of all the
other goals you've ever been given
and that everyone else takes for
granted within the spectrum of morals and goals we all have." This is why
Russell feels there should be companies that construct representations
for human values, including this concept of people's backgrounds that
would recognize the layers or ethics,
laws, and morals we all naturally take
for granted. This is why as a caveat for
AI designers along these lines Russell often uses the example of an AI
cooking program not programmed
with certain morals if it's designed
to cook dinner at all costs: "If there's
nothing in the fridge," noted Russell
in our interview for Heartificial Intelligence, "the last thing you want your
robot to do is put the cat in the oven.
That's cooking dinner-what's wrong
with that?"
I think the notion of IRL that Russell is working on provides a solid
methodology for creating a set of
Ethical Standards for the AI Industry. Like the work of the Anderson's
mentioned above, by observing how
autonomous systems respond to
and interact with humans, we can
more easily determine how people
should be treated than by simply
philosophizing about future scenarios. It's also encouraging to note
Russell does believe more experts
are beginning to address ethical
issues as AI is already having such
a huge impact on society. However,
the problems of siloes and vested
interests will still have to be dealt
with to ensure human values are
universally reflected: "AI is a technology where the people who develop it aren't necessarily the people
who use it and the people who use
it have the best interests of their
shareholders or their secretary of
defense at heart. Outcomes may not
be what the human race would want
if we all put our heads together."
DECEmber 2016

AJung Moon [11] is a Ph.D. candidate
studying human-robot interaction
and roboethics with the Mechanical Engineering Department at the
University of British Columbia (UBC).
She is also founder of the Open Roboethics Initiative [12] (ORI), an organization that allows a multidisciplinary
community to crowdsource people's
opinions on ethical and moral issues
surrounding emerging technology.
Crowdsourcing and collaboration
involves the ability for website visitors to suggest polls based on ethical questions the community can
vote on, such as issues around
autonomous vehicles or elderly care
bots. Her work and the crowdsourcing model provide a pragmatic and
compelling way to examine issues of
ethics in Artificial Intelligence.
I interviewed AJung about an
experiment she conducted featuring a delivery robot and a set of
scenarios involving how the robot
would deal with humans while waiting for an elevator. In the video featuring the experiment [13], viewers
are presented with multiple scenarios mirroring the types of ethical
decisions we currently make while
waiting for an elevator in a crowded
building. As Moon explains in the
paper [14] describing the experiment, "The goal of this work is to
provide an example of a process in
which a collection of stakeholder
discussion contents from an online
platform can provide data that captures acceptable social and moral
norms of the stakeholders. The collected data can then be analyzed
and used in a manner suitable to be
implemented onto robots to govern
robot behaviors." In other words,
Moon believes standards for AI and
robots can be created by humans,
crowdsourcing their aggregate opinions around certain situations to
form an ethical framework that can
be adopted by designers.
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

Her work and the community's
polls are fascinating in regards to
the complexity and depth of human
ethics we need to examine in light
of AI technology. For instance, in
the video series showing the large
delivery robot next to a person in a
wheelchair, most of us would likely
react as the machine does, offering
to take the next elevator. But would
the person in the wheelchair see this
as a form of condescension? And
how should the robot respond to the
person in the wheelchair in a country
where women are second-class citizens? Will manufacturers provide a
"human base level" set of ethics that
can then be iterated based on local
culture in different countries? Taking
part in Ori's polls is an excellent way
to begin to understand and empathize with the complexity of decisions
faced by AI manufacturers while
also confronting the urgent need for
individuals to become ethically self
aware. As AJung noted in our interview: "Looking at a very simple, daily
life decision scenario, we can come
to a consensus so we can program a
type of human and democratic decision making into the system. Our purpose of conducting these polls is to
involve the general public in learning
what kinds of things people value."

The Effect of the Ethics
Technology already exists that can
measure facial expression as a
proxy for emotion. Sensors in and
outside of our bodies will soon be
able to enhance the capabilities of
algorithms running Facebook or
other services we use throughout
the day. We've all had experiences
with machines or software like the
one Meyer described regarding his
deceased daughter to some degree.
This is because we're still able to differentiate between machines or poorly
designed algorithms and the humans
in our lives. But this is a finite era.
While we may recognize the glitches

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