AI, the new evil in town
Oscar Wilde reportedly once said, “Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties.” Why is evil so fascinating to people? And why has evil AI, in particular, captivated our cultural imagination? People find evil fascinating because it is terrifying. By improving how we think and talk about evil, we become better at anticipating it, recognizing it when it happens and, hopefully, preventing it.
AI appears to be a totally new kind of agent for evil. It sits somewhere between what philosophers and theologians call natural evil, like an entire village being killed by an avalanche, and moral evil, like the same village being killed by soldiers. Natural evil is caused by nature, while moral evil is caused by humans. And although we have made much progress towards understanding the causes of human evil, we still see humans as autonomous moral agents with free will, and expect them to control their evil impulses and minimize their harm to society.
While AI is not a human, it may exhibit some of the qualities that we associate with humans, such as autonomy and adaptability. Some people say that machines may someday even have free will. So AI challenges our conception of evil, as well as our attempts to diagnose the causes of evil. When an AI learns autonomously to manipulate the stock market, do we blame its human programmer, even though the programmer never suggested such a strategy? What if it learned this behavior by observing another human doing the same! Which human do we blame? Or do we blame both? These are fascinating questions that highlight some of the difficulties ahead.
Focusing on AI evil does not imply an opposition to AI technology. AI has the potential to bring immense benefits to humanity. Robots can alleviate dangerous tasks such as search-and-rescue operations, or tedious tasks like assembling the same pieces over and over in a factory. AI can advance medical diagnosis and drug discovery to help save millions of human lives. AI algorithms can help us optimize our global supply chains to reduce costs and carbon emissions. AI tools can also aid in human creative expression. We should continue to develop the technology for the benefit of humanity.