The Ethics Blog

A blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)

Tag: AI ethics

Objects that behave humanly

smiling robot making eye contact
23 April, 2024 / / 1 Comment

Many forms of artificial intelligence could be considered objects that behave humanly. However, it does not take much for us humans to personify non-living objects. We get angry at the car that does not start or the weather that does not let us have a picnic, as if they were against us. Children spontaneously personify simple toys and can describe the relationship between geometric shapes as, “the small circle is trying to escape from the big triangle.”

We are increasingly encountering artificial intelligence designed to give a human impression, for example in the form of chatbots for customer service when shopping online. Such AI can even be equipped with personal traits, a persona that becomes an important part of the customer experience. The chatbot can suggest even more products for you and effectively generate additional sales based on the data collected about you. No wonder the interest in developing human-like AI is huge. Part of it has to do with user-friendliness, of course, but at the same time, an AI that you find personally attractive will grab your attention. You might even like the chatbot or feel it would be impolite to turn it off. During the time that the chatbot has your attention, you are exposed to increasingly customized advertising and receive more and more package offers.

You can read about this and much more in an article about human relationships with AI designed to give a human impression: Human/AI relationships: challenges, downsides, and impacts on human/human relationships. The authors discuss a large number of examples of such AI, ranging from the chatbots above to care robots and AI that offers psychotherapy, or AI that people chat with to combat loneliness. The opportunities are great, but so are the challenges and possible drawbacks, which the article highlights.

Perhaps particularly interesting is the insight into how effectively AI can create confusion by exposing us to objects equipped with human response patterns. Our natural tendency to anthropomorphize non-human things meets high-tech efforts to produce objects that are engineered to behave humanly. Here it is no longer about imaginatively projecting social relations onto non-human objects, as in the geometric example above. In interaction with AI objects, we react to subtle social cues that the objects are equipped with. We may even feel a moral responsibility for such AI and grieve when companies terminate or modify it.

The authors urge caution so that we do not overinterpret AI objects as persons. At the same time, they warn of the risk that, by avoiding empathic responses, we become less sensitive to real people in need. Truly confusing!

Pär Segerdahl

Written by…

Pär Segerdahl, Associate Professor at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics and editor of the Ethics Blog.

Zimmerman, A., Janhonen, J. & Beer, E. Human/AI relationships: challenges, downsides, and impacts on human/human relationships. AI Ethics (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-023-00348-8

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How can neuroethics and AI ethics join their forces?

Photo by Tara Winstead
8 March, 2022 / / 1 Comment

As I already wrote on this blog, there has been an explosion of AI in recent years. AI affects so many aspects of our lives that it is virtually impossible to avoid interacting with it. Since AI has such an impact, it must be examined from an ethical point of view, for the very basic reason that it can be developed and/or used for both good and evil.

In fact, AI ethics is becoming increasingly popular nowadays. As it is a fairly young discipline, even though it has roots in, for example, digital and computer ethics, the question is open about its status and methodology. To simplify the debate, the main trend is to conceive AI ethics in terms of practical ethics, for example, with a focus on the impact of AI on traditional practices in education, work, healthcare, entertainment, among others. In addition to this practically oriented analysis, there is also attention to the impact of AI on the way we understand our society and ourselves as part of it.

In this debate about the identity of AI ethics, the need for a closer collaboration with neuroethics has been briefly pointed out, but so far no systematic reflection has been made on this need. In a new article, I propose, together with Kathinka Evers and Arleen Salles, an argument to justify the need for closer collaboration between neuroethics and AI ethics. In a nutshell, even though they both have specific identities and their topics do not completely overlap, we argue that neuroethics can complement AI ethics for both content-related and methodological reasons.

Some of the issues raised by AI are related to fundamental questions that neuroethics has explored since its inception. Think, for example, of topics such as intelligence: what does it mean to be intelligent? In what sense can a machine be qualified as an intelligent agent? Could this be a misleading use of words? And what ethical implications can this linguistic habit have, for example, on how we attribute responsibility to machines and to humans? Another issue that is increasingly gaining ground in AI ethics literature, as I wrote on this blog, is the conceivability and the possibility of artificial consciousness. Neuroethics has worked extensively on both intelligence and consciousness, combining applied and fundamental analyses, which can serve as a source of relevant information for AI ethics.

In addition to the above content-related reasons, neuroethics can also provide AI ethics with a methodological model. To illustrate, the kind of conceptual clarification performed in fundamental neuroethics can enrich the identification and assessment of the practical ethical issues raised by AI. More specifically, neuroethics can provide a three-step model of analysis to AI ethics: 1. Conceptual relevance: can specific notions, such as autonomy, be attributed to AI? 2. Ethical relevance: are these specific notions ethically salient (i.e., do they require ethical evaluation)? 3. Ethical value: what is the ethical significance and the related normative implications of these specific notions?

This three-step approach is a promising methodology for ethical reflection about AI which avoids the trap anthropocentric self-projection, a risk that actually affects both the philosophical reflection on AI and its technical development.

In this way, neuroethics can contribute to avoiding both hypes and disproportionate worries about AI, which are among the biggest challenges facing AI ethics today.

Written by…

Michele Farisco, Postdoc Researcher at Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics, working in the EU Flagship Human Brain Project.

Farisco, M., Evers, K. & Salles, A. On the Contribution of Neuroethics to the Ethics and Regulation of Artificial Intelligence. Neuroethics 15, 4 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-022-09484-0

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