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Editorial: International AI Ethics Panel Must Be Independent

August 21, 2019

France and Canada are establishing an international committee to advise on the ethics of artificial intelligence. The group should be supported and shielded from undue influence.

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Inhumane or Unavoidable?

June 17, 2019

As Congress scrutinizes an increase in monkey research, scientists defend its necessity

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Vox asked 15 experts, “What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?” Here’s what they told them. Predicting society’s moral evolution on eating meat, kids playing football, 401(k)s, and more

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Hindsight 2070

Thursday, April 4th, 2019

Some 50 years ago, in 1964, 42 percent of Americans smoked cigarettes. Smoking in bars and offices was normal and cigarettes were given to soldiers as part of military rations. Half of American physicians smoked. Ads for cigarettes bombarded the American public. That year, the surgeon general released a report outlining the health risks of smoking. Two years later, only 40 percent of Americans said that they believed smoking was a major cause of cancer.

Today, we know that smoking is bad for our health. We’ve banned smoking in most indoor public spaces. We stopped allowing tobacco companies to advertise and forced them to put warning labels on cigarette boxes. By 2001, 71 percent of the country said they recognized smoking was a major cause of cancer, and by 2017, the rate of smokers dropped to 14 percent. The habit is now looked at as a relic of the past, something we’ve come to accept as unquestionably harmful.

When we think about what common habits, social norms, or laws that are widely considered unthinkable in today’s world, a variety of past atrocities come to mind. We could point to bloodletting, Jim Crow-era segregation, and drinking and driving as being on the “wrong side” of history.

But what modern practices will we one day think of as barbaric? It’s a framework invoked frequently in political or scientific beliefs: Actor Harrison Ford recently said leaders who deny climate change are on the “wrong side of history.” President Barack Obama said Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine was on the “wrong side of history.” Filmmaker Spike Lee said that President Donald Trump himself is on the “wrong side of history.”

…continue reading ‘Hindsight 2070’

Image: By Vassil – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27638585

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Ebola Vaccine Will Be Provided to Women Who Are Pregnant, Marking Reversal in Policy

February 21, 2019

Carleigh Krubiner, faculty member at the Berman Institute, said in a statement.“The DRC’s decision to extend Ebola vaccine coverage to pregnant women is a huge step forward, not only for pregnant women in areas affected by outbreaks but for all pregnant women who may face the threat of Ebola in the future”

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World Health Organization Forms Committee To Guide Editing Of Human Genes

February 15, 2019

The 18-member committee “will examine the scientific, ethical, social and legal challenges associated with human genome editing,” according to the WHO announcement

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Hospitals Are Asking Their Own Patients to Donate Money

January 24, 2019

Nonprofit hospitals across the United States are seeking donations from the people who rely on them most: their patients

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Images of Suffering Can Bring About Change

September 12, 2018

But are they ethical? Legal scholar Alison Dundes Renteln is aware that images of suffering are often part of human rights campaigns, and notes the value of freedom of expression. At the same time, she argues for ethical limitations on the right to take pictures

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Sim Ethics

September 6, 2018

Say you could make a thousand digital replicas of yourself – should you? What happens when you want to get rid of them?

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Sim Ethics

Thursday, September 6th, 2018

If you’ve ever dabbled in role-playing games – either online or in old-fashioned meatspace – you’ll know how easy it is to get attached to your avatar. It really hurts when your character gets mashed by a troll, felled by a dragon or slain by a warlock. The American sociologist (and enthusiastic gamer) William Sims Bainbridge has taken this relationship a step further, creating virtual representations for at least 17 deceased family members. In a 2013 essay about online avatars, he foresees a time when we’ll be able to offload parts of our identity onto artificially intelligent simulations of ourselves that could function independently of us, and even persist after we die.

What sorts of responsibilities would we owe to these simulated humans? However else we might feel about violent computer games, no one seriously thinks it’s homicide when you blast a virtual assailant to oblivion. Yet it’s no longer absurd to imagine that simulated people might one day exist, and be possessed of some measure of autonomy and consciousness. Many philosophers believe that minds like ours don’t have to be hosted by webs of neurons in our brains, but could exist in many different sorts of material systems. If they’re right, there’s no obvious reason why sufficiently powerful computers couldn’t hold consciousness in their circuits.

Today, moral philosophers ponder the ethics of shaping human populations, with questions such as: what is the worth of a human life? What kind of lives should we strive to build? How much weight should we attach to the value of human diversity? But when it comes to thinking through the ethics of how to treat simulated entities, it’s not clear that we should rely on the intuitions we’ve developed in our flesh-and-blood world. We feel in our bones that there’s something wrong with killing a dog, and perhaps even a fly. But does it feel quite the same to shut down a simulation of a fly’s brain – or a human’s? When ‘life’ takes on new digital forms, our own experience might not serve as a reliable moral guide.

…continue reading ‘Sim Ethics’

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