The Bishop of Oxford, who sits on the House of Lords artificial intelligence committee, has come up with a ten commandments of AI:
AI should be designed for all, and benefit humanity.
AI should operate on principles of transparency and fairness, and be well signposted.
AI should not be used to transgress the data rights and privacy of individuals, families, or communities.
The application of AI should be to reduce inequality of wealth, health, and opportunity.
AI should not be used for criminal intent, nor to subvert the values of our democracy, nor truth, nor courtesy in public discourse.
The primary purpose of AI should be to enhance and augment, rather than replace, human labour and creativity.
All citizens have the right to be adequately educated to flourish mentally, emotionally, and economically in a digital and artificially intelligent world.
AI should never be developed or deployed separately from consideration of the ethical consequences of its applications.
The autonomous power to hurt or destroy should never be vested in artificial intelligence.
Governments should ensure that the best research and application of AI is directed toward the most urgent problems facing humanity.
I like them; they provide an essential dimension to this debate.
Now, for ten commandments of tax....
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[…] knew I should not have said we needed a ten commandments of tax. Here is what, I stress, is a first […]
“The primary purpose of AI should be to enhance and augment, rather than replace, human labour…..)
Heaven forfend we should transgress the bounds of the ‘Protestant work ethic’. The bishop’s flock must be available to be fleeced 🙂
But most want to work….
“But most want to work….’
No they don’t. Women are more likely to want to work, but they only want to work for the benefits, so long denied to most of them, that having some control of ‘their own’ money gives them.
Men want to play. And It’s only a matter of gender inequality that means women have not got so far as to see that as a realistic aspiration. Actually most men haven’t either because work has been hijacked by the people you identify as rentiers.
As well as being the technological ape we are also neotenous. We do not grow up.
Like the Axolotl there is no known adult form of Homo Sapiens. (No smiley)
I will be candid: on this I simply do not agree. Of course there is no universal rule, because not all humans are the same, but it is my experience the great many people do want to work because they want the much broader benefits that result from it apart from money including status, community, purpose, and a simple sense of achievement. Far too much work denies them these things, so we need good work, but I still think people want to work.
I don’t think people want to take paid work as such, more they want structure to their lives and work’s presented as the way to do that. I gather many retirees lead fulfilling lives post the 9-5 drudgery, assuming of course they have the funding to be able to follow their passion or develop their interests.
Quite a lot of them do things that look remarkably like work too
I dont see AI being the big game changer many think its going to be.
I do agree we can and should use / technology to enhance everyone’s life and to benefit society.
But to suggest that robots and computers will remove many parts of work is not possible, it also stresses too much reliance on technology and the power system of the world.
However I am not going to argue with anyone. Days can be spent, especially on twitter, with ‘fans’ who say AI and crypto currencies are going to take the world over. I am all for ambition, which is fantastic, without that google wouldn’t be here today. Many of the UKs biggest / smallest companies wouldnt be here today.
But for anyone to say that secretaries for instance are going to disappear, when most CEOS rely on them and cant handle their computers breaking down.
Luke says:
“I don’t see AI being the big game changer many think it’s going to be.”
“I do agree we can and should use / technology to enhance everyone’s life and to benefit society.”
We do. We have done. The challenge is to share the benefits across society. We haven’t been at all consistent in even aiming to do that.
“But to suggest that robots and computers will remove many parts of work is not possible, it also stresses too much reliance on technology and the power system of the world.”
Robots and computers are only a modern version of the mechanisation of labour which has been going on constantly since Home Sapiens became the tool making ape. The most primitive flint knife made made meat preparation easier etc. etc.
Humanity is the technological ape. No way could we turn our back on that. It is our nature – it’s hard wired. No other species works so hard to bend the environment to its will through the employment of technology. Arguably none does so at all with deliberation.
“But to suggest that robots and computers will remove many parts of work is not possible”
Loads of people make this point and I am sorry to say that it is not a point worth making. None of the profesionals who know the subject well has ever suggested that robots or AI would or could replace all human contribution. But that’s beside the point.
Current estimates suggest that, foreseeably, about 40% of workplace activity could be further automated. A 40% addition to unemployment, or underemployment would be devastating and there is nothing in the current world to suggest that the “productivity” benefits would flow on to workers and the public generally.
Alternatively, a new world of increased leisure and improved living standards could ensue but that would (will) require a paradigm shift in the way that labour and income is allocated. Markets can’t do that.
Here, try this:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-intelligence
As Harari says in his book Homo Deus, a disconnect is taking place between consciousness and (artificial) intelligence (which he describes often as algorithm or a series of algorithms). Once machines are able to think and act logically, they may decide there is no need for the human race. What then?
This idea is part of what has long been referred to as “the singularity”. There’s lost of good sci-fi based on that concept. There is also Terminator 3.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/22/skynet-real_n_7042808.html
If there is a danger it is definitely from AI rather than robotics. Once software algorithms are established they will quickly become cheap to replicate and distribute whereas robotics requires high-quality engineering that (it seems to me) will always be very expensive to reproduce and will therefore restrict its applications.
It is difficult to assess whether AI really does represent a threat to productive work for humans or if it be like previous technological advances that have just increased the scope of what humans can achieve, e.g. anyone fancy threshing corn by hand for a living?
In the UK economy currently the problem is with not enough automation/capital expenditure with the consequent use of people has “human robots”. I have a perfectly functional automatic car was over the road from my house, but it is frequently empty whilst the hand car wash in the same time is always busy (I imagine paying the people working there the minimum wage).
I agree with the commandments above but unfortunately the idea of sharing economic advantage (of any kind) is antithetical to current government and business practice.
One of the less-publicised principles of GDPR – the General Data Protection Regulations being implemented in law across the EU (and in the UK, who led the process) is that all ‘algorithmic’ decisions having a material impact on the life of a human being must have a channel of appeal to and by another human being.
The legal foundation is in the law of discrimination, and the fact that decisions having the effect of (say) racial discrimination are still racist, and still illegal, no matter how sincerely you can point at your algorithm’s decision trees and heuristics, and argue that each component is, in isolation, entirely free of deliberate racial bias.
It shouldn’t amuse me, but it does: one of the side effects of sacking all the bank managers in the 1980s, and replacing them with box-ticking and credit-scoring exercises administered by soulless machines, was an up-tick in business formation by black, Indian, and Asian people in the United Kingdom.
For obvious reasons, no statistics are available, and none ever will be; and nobody working in a British bank will ever say it on the record.
And everyone in commercial banking knows about it.
Britain led the way on that; and enjoyed the perverse ‘first mover disadvantage’ of an unwanted commercial success in small businesses banking.
The sophistication of our algorithms improved and, by the time my professional colleagues across the water were automating their bank managers out of work, they had acquired the subtle skills required to write the racism back in.
I know what has been ‘inadvertently’ written into the rule-acquisition algorithms that we loosely call ‘AI’, and the dark arts of biasing their training sets; and I can assure you that the holy grail of Artificial Intelligence research is not Commander Data and the ‘Star Trek’ future.
It is to satisfy a commercial demand for implementing systematic racism – and a host of other repellent prejudices against our fellow human beings – with sufficient subtlety to be convincingly deniable and legally irreproachable, and to make a handsome profit doing so.
Nile says:
” one of the side effects of sacking all the bank managers in the 1980s, ….. was an up-tick in business formation by black, Indian, and Asian people in the United Kingdom.”
Interesting. I’d not picked-up on that before anywhere.
“And everyone in commercial banking knows about it.” I’ll bet they do. !!
AI is going to have to be very ‘I’ to circumvent the (conscious and unconscious) warping bias of the programmers.
But it is our only hope for a future with any semblance of a level playing field.
They used to say that the IQ test was essentially a test of how White, Anglo Saxon and Protestant you were. (Something a normally socialised person can assess in about three nano seconds. Without even being aware they have done it.)
Machines have a long way to catch up. My ‘gut’ suspicion is that we won’t make real progress with machine learning until we can follow Asimov’s insight about ‘brains’ with an organic component.
Even then we will struggle because whereas evolution is an essentially passive filter human design is intrusively active which leads us into the trap of the Law of unintended consequences.
What I wonder would be the consequences of designing an intelligence with immunity to/from unintended consequences. ?
Os there a linguist in the house ? Does ‘immunity’ take the dative or the ablative , anybody? I’m not entirely comfortable with either.
Pass….
They remind me of:
Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Thanks for this, MFT. I too was reminded of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. Perhaps we should look to the stories surrounding the reasons that they became necessary, and also changed from the initial Laws. Good read anyway! Smile.