By tracking how people live their values, businesses can and must instil ethical frameworks into the technologies of the future

At a time when most media surrounding artificial intelligence are focused on wondering when machines will become self-aware, a larger question is which ethical frameworks should guide this autonomous evolution.

Personalisation algorithms scrutinise human behaviour to a molecular level and define, by our actions, what values we’re living on a daily and even momentary basis. But when it comes to questions of consciousness, spirituality and wellbeing, it’s only by becoming self-aware that we will be able to define humanity within the environment of mechanised sentience.

For the business world, this collective human introspection could provide a form of corporate social responsibility for individuals. Data about our actions – when shared in an opt-in, non-Orwellian context – and our professed values would provide organisations with a richer opportunity for connection and relevancy than the clandestine tracking common to marketing today.

Using sensor data to track how individuals live their values would provide insights that could inspire increased wellbeing via more purpose-driven lives. This is the process humanity needs to pursue with rigour to ensure we’re building agents who align with our goals versus opting to prioritise their own.

Coding and consciousness

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) ethics has existed for a number of years and has recently seen a resurgence of interest.

Stuart Russell, professor of computer science and Smith-Zadeh professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, uses a methodology for the process of ethics in AI known as inverse reinforcement learning (IRL).



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With IRL, sensor-based systems observe humans to identify the behaviours that would be identified as ethically based. Once a behaviour is matched to an ethical modality, code can be reverse engineered to programme AI systems at the operating system level. So the codes by which we live can be translated into the ones and zeros that bring an algorithm to life.

As an example of this process, Russell pointed out in a recent speech at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge how a robot might observe people repeatedly boiling water and pouring it over black crystals every morning. By noting the humans’ improved mood, the value of the coffee ritual becomes codified. Russell later explained, however, that goals for humans exist in the context of how we have already lived our lives up to the point we receive a new goal. For instance, if we run out of meat when cooking we know not to cook our pet cat, but this is a value we would need to programme in a kitchen robot’s algorithm.

As a result, Russell feels there should be companies that construct representations for human values, including this concept of people’s backgrounds that would recognise the layers or ethics, laws and morals we take for granted. A prototype of this kind of organisation exists in the Open Roboethics Initiative that crowdsources ethically-focused insights around AI and robotics. It’s this type of recognition of our individual role in the creation of values for AI that represents a major opportunity for innovation and industry moving forward.

The ethics of your robot car

While at first it may appear that analysing ethical codes on a granular level due to the rise of AI technology is superfluous for the average individual, think again.

Many major car manufacturers have announced that they will feature some level of autonomy in their vehicles by 2020. For instance, General Motors’ 2017 Cadillac will offer Super Cruise technology that can brake, accelerate or steer at speeds over 70mph. Self-driving vehicles appear to be inevitable. While a major drawback is their potential to put millions out of work, they could save lives that might otherwise have been lost due to negligent driving.

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But, as engineer and philosopher Jason Millar points out in Wired, you should have a say in your robot car’s code of ethics. Millar posits a typical ethical quandary known as the “tunnel problem” to demonstrate a scenario many of us may face in the near future in our self-driving cars: while driving towards a narrow tunnel in your autonomous vehicle, a small child runs into the street and falls, leaving you with two options – kill the child or sacrifice your life by crashing into the tunnel.

This is a choice we might have to make today, but the critical point with autonomous technology is that programmers have already been tasked with making these decisions for you. What happens if you believe you should sacrifice your own life but your car kills the child instead?

Millar provides an excellent suggestion for these situations by modelling ethical concerns after the idea of informed consent for medical issues, an idea he refers to as “moral proxies”.

A vision for values

We can’t continue to move forward in an environment where our ethical desires in AI are ignored in the same way we’re tracked without direct access to the insights surrounding our personal data.

Ethics in AI shouldn’t be an afterthought, weighing risks for products already fully realised. The opportunity for innovation will come when we can inform the AI manufacturing process with programming based on the codification of our deeply held beliefs.

How will machines know what we value if we don’t know ourselves? That’s the question we need to answer today or else algorithms will continue to take decisions out of our hands, and we’ll have lost the chance to try.