Unsupervised

CHAPTER 14Ethics and Policy

“Pity those who don't feel anything at all.”

—Sarah J. Maas

Ethics comprise many individually and collectively massively complex disciplines that not only vary greatly depending on one's location and personal perspectives, but are also subject to constant change for a host of different reasons. Technology, in all its forms, has always been particularly challenging to the status quo of ethical standards in any period and has kept executioners around the world rather busy over the millennia. Frontier technologies are already setting up to be among the greatest challenges in history to established standards around the world. As if to prove the point, Google has already fired two of its ethics researchers, and in April 2023, the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, left the company warning of its dangers. Because the topic of ethics is so vast, not only is it hard to provide meaningful answers, but it is also even tough to be confident in the correct questions to ask. That said, the following are some thoughts.

What Are—or Should Be—the Dominant Laws of Frontier Technology?

Here is a simple set of guidelines that could be globally accepted, all based on Asimov's laws:

• A technology may not harm humanity.
• A technology may not injure a human being.
• A technology must take orders from human beings.
• A technology must protect its own existence.

As simple as these might sound, they raise intractable issues about what is human, what is humanity, and which ...