Shared Benefit Principle: AI technologies should benefit and empower as many people as possible.

Today, the combined wealth of the eight richest people in the world is greater than that of the poorest half of the global population. That is, 8 people have more than the combined wealth of 3,600,000,000 others.

This is already an extreme example of income inequality, but if we don’t prepare properly for artificial intelligence, the situation could get worse. In addition to the obvious economic benefits that would befall whoever designs advanced AI first, those who profit from AI will also likely have: access to better health care, happier and longer lives, more opportunities for their children, various forms of intelligence enhancement, and so on.

A Cultural Shift

Our approach to technology so far has been that whoever designs it first, wins — and they win big. In addition to the fabulous wealth an inventor can accrue, the creator of a new technology also assumes complete control over the product and its distribution. This means that an invention or algorithm will only benefit those whom the creator wants it to benefit. While this approach may have worked with previous inventions, many are concerned that advanced AI will be so powerful that we can’t treat it as business-as-usual.

What if we could ensure that as AI is developed we all benefit? Can we make a collective — and pre-emptive — decision to use AI to help raise up all people, rather than just a few?

Joshua Greene, a professor of psychology at Harvard, explains his take on this Principle: “We’re saying in advance, before we know who really has it, that this is not a private good. It will land in the hands of some private person, it will land in the hands of some private company, it will land in the hands of some nation first. But this principle is saying, ‘It’s not yours.’ That’s an important thing to say because the alternative is to say that potentially, the greatest power that humans ever develop belongs to whoever gets it first.”

AI researcher Susan Craw also agreed with the Principle, and she further clarified it.

“That’s definitely a yes,” Craw said, “But it is AI technologies plural, when it’s taken as a whole. Rather than saying that a particular technology should benefit lots of people, it’s that the different technologies should benefit and empower people.”

The Challenge of Implementation

However, as is the case with all of the Principles, agreeing with them is one thing; implementing them is another. John Havens, the Executive Director of The IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, considered how the Shared Benefit Principle would ultimately need to be modified so that the new technologies will benefit both developed and developing countries alike.

“Yes, it’s great,” Havens said of the Principle, before adding, “if you can put a comma after it, and say … something like, ‘issues of wealth, GDP, notwithstanding.’ The point being, what this infers is whatever someone can afford, it should still benefit them.”

Patrick Lin, a philosophy professor at California Polytechnic State University, was even more concerned about how the Principle might be implemented, mentioning the potential for unintended consequences.

Lin explained: “Shared benefit is interesting, because again, this is a principle that implies consequentialism, that we should think about ethics as satisfying the preferences or benefiting as many people as possible. That approach to ethics isn’t always right. … Consequentialism often makes sense, so weighing these pros and cons makes sense, but that’s not the only way of thinking about ethics. Consequentialism could fail you in many cases. For instance, consequentialism might green-light torturing or severely harming a small group of people if it gives rise to a net increase in overall happiness to the greater community.”

“That’s why I worry about the … Shared Benefit Principle,” Lin continued. “[It] makes sense, but [it] implicitly adopts a consequentialist framework, which by the way is very natural for engineers and technologists to use, so they’re very numbers-oriented and tend to think of things in black and white and pros and cons, but ethics is often squishy. You deal with these squishy, abstract concepts like rights and duties and obligations, and it’s hard to reduce those into algorithms or numbers that could be weighed and traded off.”

As we move from discussing these Principles as ideals to implementing them as policy, concerns such as those that Lin just expressed will have to be addressed, keeping possible downsides of consequentialism and utilitarianism in mind.

The Big Picture

The devil will always be in the details. As we consider how we might shift cultural norms to prevent all benefits going only to the creators of new technologies — as well as considering the possible problems that could arise if we do so — it’s important to remember why the Shared Benefit Principle is so critical. Roman Yampolskiy, an AI researcher at the University of Louisville, sums this up:

“Early access to superior decision-making tools is likely to amplify existing economic and power inequalities turning the rich into super-rich, permitting dictators to hold on to power and making oppositions’ efforts to change the system unlikely to succeed. Advanced artificial intelligence is likely to be helpful in medical research and genetic engineering in particular making significant life extension possible, which would remove one the most powerful drivers of change and redistribution of power – death. For this and many other reasons, it is important that AI tech should be beneficial and empowering to all of humanity, making all of us wealthier and healthier.”

What Do You Think?

How important is the Shared Benefit Principle to you? How can we ensure that the benefits of new AI technologies are spread globally, rather than remaining with only a handful of people who developed them? How can we ensure that we don’t inadvertently create more problems in an effort to share the benefits of AI?

This article is part of a series on the 23 Asilomar AI Principles. The Principles offer a framework to help artificial intelligence benefit as many people as possible. But, as AI expert Toby Walsh said of the Principles, “Of course, it’s just a start. … a work in progress.” The Principles represent the beginning of a conversation, and now we need to follow up with broad discussion about each individual principle. You can read the discussions about previous principles here.