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Awareness of human consequences is a necessity in all scientific & engineering disciplines. It's even more important in fields that are "high leverage", where a very small team consisting entirely of engineers can make a big impact. Like CS, and in particular AI.
If your work has "impact", then by definition it is changing the world. You must then ask *how* the world is changing -- in which direction does your impact point? Who benefits and who loses out? Technological impact always has a moral direction.
I should add, the need for ethics awareness arises from the *applications* of AI. If your work is very theoretical, it generally does not have any materialized impact, and its potential impact could go in any direction.
Likewise with regulations -- they should target *applications*, not research or technology in an abstract sense.
Well stated. "Not everything that can be done should be done!" Very true in AI engineering!
Fortunately we are living in largely peaceful times, so we are dealing with the easy versions of these problems. We only have to look at the Manhattan Project and the immense moral dilemmas that accompanied it to get a sense of what awaits AI researchers the next time a big war
breaks out. Hopefully we have a code of ethics in place by then as well good moral leadership in the community.
This makes me wonder - overall non-AI software engineering has a lot more impact than just AI-related software engineering, so why are there so many ethics committees specifically for AI rather than (any?) other software subfields
I agree that people should ask these questions, but if they do, they should take it further: What are the common lapses in reasoning when people consider ethics in general? What are some of the common solutions that stem out, and what are their failure points?
Second-order consequences abound.
The purported harm of considering ethics is that it slows progress. Our arguments must address this, and show that the long term benefits of ethical AI outweigh the short term cost of slower progress.
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