Julie E. Mehan - Artificial intelligence : ethical, social and security impacts for the present and the future

Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation. Or the worst. We just dont know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it.

Legendary physicist Stephen Hawking

In the interests of full disclosure, I am a Professor of Digital Ethics at the University of Maryland and not a researcher or developer of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In addition to digital ethics, Ive also taught courses in Cyberterrorism, Information Technology, and Information Systems Management. Although I possess no formal training in the mathematical and statistical underpinnings of AI, my longstanding engagement with digital ethics, and more recently the ethics of AI and its associated technologies, has given me a front-row seat to many of the efforts to assess and define the potential impact of AI on individuals, our society, and our ethical foundation.

Over the past few years, the topic of AI, or essentially algorithmicsimple tool powering our smartphones or allowing us to ask Alexa about the latest movie schedules. AI is a technology that is, in very subtle but unmistakable ways, exerting an ever-increasing influence over our lives and in somewhat unpredictable ways. And the more we use it, the more AI is altering our lives and our environment.

And it is not just that humans are spending more and more time staring at a smartphone screen, their habits and routines are also being affected by the services offered by AI-power applications and tools. AI is changing the way our brains work, how we relate to other individuals, how we get and understand our news, how well we retain information or not, and even how we define what it is to be human.

The rise of AI and super-intelligent AI raises a number of ethical issues. AI is the power behind Googles search engine, it enables social media sites to serve up targeted advertising, and gives Alexa and Siri their voices. AI is also the technology enabling self-driving vehicles, predictive policing, and autonomous weapons that have the ability to kill without direct human intervention. All of these AI technologies and more bring up complex, ethical issues that are as yet unresolved, and will continue to be the subject of ongoing debate.

As the AI Now Institute states,

The vast majority of AI systems and related technologies are being put in place with minimal oversight, few accountability mechanisms, and little information about their broader implications. Those developing these systems are generally private companies, whose incentives do not always align with those of the

This book seeks to look at the complex topic of AI ethics in a cross-functional way, alternating between theory and practice. Practical and recent events and the associated challenges are presented, such as the collateral effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the application of AI technologies. An up-to-date overview of the potential positive and negative outcomes of AI implementations is portrayed, together with an analysis of AI from an ethical perspective. Furthermore, this book offers concrete approaches to identify appropriate ethical principles in AI-based solutions.

Unless stated otherwise, all figures are the authors own. Some figures have been created using the Creative Commons Organization: https://creativecommons.org/.

An algorithm is a set of instructions for how a computing system should accomplish a particular task.

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