Reimagining Businesses with AI

CHAPTER 12Dealing with Ethics, Privacy, and Security

“The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.”

—Nick Bilton

INTRODUCTION

The concerns highlighted by New York Times tech-columnist Nick Bilton lie at the heart of the debate on how far AI should be allowed to go.⁽¹⁾

Over the centuries, civilizations have been defined by the ethics or moral code they hold. Morality drives a degree of fairness and uniformity on how different constituents of society, including business, consumers, and polity, interact with each other. Human decision making practiced today considers both the outcome or implication and morality aspects of the decision. As machines are empowered with more cognitive capabilities, the next big topic of consideration and even research is how we address the ethics-related issues so that everybody is treated fairly, no data or information is used against anybody's interests without their knowledge, and it is possible to explain the rationale behind every decision made by the machine. This is a complicated subject because there are emotive, ethical, legislative, and commercial considerations in addition to the technical complexities. At the same time, since there are so much data and information that are getting transacted ...