Sep 15, 2021
By Marie Oldfield (CStat, CSci, FIScT)
For a long time the areas of technology and philosophy have been on a collision course.As we spoke about in the last blog, decisions made around our ethical and moral codes are then implemented into algorithms that decides who wins, who loses, who lives and who dies. We are being forced to confront our most basic human traits and then convert them into code. This would be easy, potentially, if we actually had a handle on what this consisted of.
The problem is that humans are very complex creatures and a choice for one situation may not be the right choice for another. We take in vast amounts of information about the world as well and being given societal structures and ‘programmed’ in certain ways as we grow up. What is acceptable one decade may not be acceptable the next.
General Intelligence was sought as a cure all for this where we take something akin to an entire human existence and shove it into a chip. This doesn’t work for many reasons. 1. There is too much information, 2. Humans are not always logical and may be very biased depending on the situation. For example, if a car is heading towards your nephew and to avoid his death you must kill 5 others in a group, the bias in us says kill the 5. The algorithm, programmed to minimise life loss would kill your nephew instead. However, if your nephew was in the group and it was a stranger alone you may choose to kill the stranger. These are the decisions we are asking machines to take on our enlargement. One might be forgiven for thinking that it is preposterous to hand such decisions to a machine, and they would be correct.
In the case of driverless cars this would work if all cars were on a grid system centrally controlled by AI. With uniform movement within strict guidelines there is less room for accidents. However, can we account for the child or dog running into the road? How do we get to a world with a centrally controlled AI running the streets? We are far away from perfection yet and the insistence on merging technology with humanity will continue to throw up unpalatable discussions. However, to move forward we must get to know ourselves better.