Is Artificial Intelligence a double edge sword ?
[ESSEC Knowledge] by Laurent Bibard- Professor of Management at ESSEC Business School.
Abstract
When pondering the ethical questions posed by artificial intelligence, it’s important to keep two main points in mind:
- Developing new technologies and advancing artificial intelligence is not an ethical issue in and of itself. It is not technology that poses the problem, but rather how we use it and how we dream of using it. This clarification is a tale as old as time, and it is crucial to remember it and to combat our naïveté when debating the ethics of artificial intelligence
- Today, this question appears in countless different forms and scenarios. This showcases the fascination inspired by “new technologies” and shows that artificial intelligence has progressed immensely. The biggest problem is actually that it is implicitly assumed or explicitly stated that artificial intelligence will not only surpass human intelligence in the future, and even that it has already done so. Among system designers, this results in the assumption that humans are ultimately only a source of error. One of the major consequences of this assumption are that the engineers who design the systems that are supposed to replace humans are de facto, without question, far superior in all senses – including ethically – to the humans who are supposed to manage said systems. This is particularly true when one is supposed to anticipate the ethical decision-making problems in potential emergency situations, such as for self-driving vehicles or in aviation.
Putting aside the grave ethical problems linked to short-term thinking and cost-cutting that Boeing, for example, experienced in the case of its rushed conception of the Boeing 737 Max, there is also an ethical problem specifically linked to its design, implementation and the (dys)functions of the MCAS system meant to ensure aircraft safety in the event of stalling due to a loss of speed.
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