Ethics - in Private & Public Relationships

Answer:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging and evolving group of technologies that facilitate intelligence and human capabilities to sense, comprehend, and act in accordance with the use of machines. It can transform the world through its myriad applications and uses, such as better medical diagnoses, finding new ways to cure cancer, making cars safer, etc.
However, Al also has the potential to disrupt the world by threat of its misuse by terrorists, concerns of racial profiling, growing materialism and consumerism and degradation of the value system in the society. For instance, Microsoft’s chatbot Tay on Twitter raised critical concerns of Al technology as it started tweeting racist and inflammatory content. Further, in the future, Al facial recognition and surveillance technology can be used to discriminate against people of colour and minorities.
The ethical choices required to make Al good for humanity include:

• Legality, fairness and transparency: Artificial intelligence technologies rely heavily on user data collection thereby raising concerns with respect to privacy, security, racial profiling and civil liberties. Therefore, Al developed on ethical choices of transparency, fairness and robust legal guidelines can address the above concerns. For example, the EU General Data Protection Regulation requires organizations to consider privacy from the initial design stages through the end of the product development process.
• Social inclusivity: Al tools can lead to job losses through self-driving cars and may widen wealth inequality. Therefore, various tools, skills, partnerships required to achieve transformative innovation through Al based on ethical choices such as social inclusivity, compassion and empathy for the poor, etc. can help counter hatred and jealousy in the society and pave the way for social progress. For example, the National Al Portal of India aims to make Al-related developments transparent and accessible.
• Ethical business practices: Use of Al centered on corporate transparency, community outreach, positive engagement with customers, etc., can pave the way for a new era for customer relations.
• Integrity and confidentiality: Al systems should not be used for social scoring or mass surveillance purposes. Further, attention must be paid to the psychological and cognitive impact that these systems can have on children.

Governments, business sectors and academicians need to bring codes of ethics into the Al discussion. The recent UNESCO’s Global Agreement on the Ethics of Al guiding governments and companies is a step in the right direction.