Summary: We are releasing four case studies on AI and ethics, as part of the Princeton Dialogues on AI and Ethics.
The impacts of rapid developments in artificial intelligence (“AI”) on society—both real and not yet realized—raise deep and pressing questions about our philosophical ideals and institutional arrangements. AI is currently applied in a wide range of fields—such as medical diagnosis, criminal sentencing, online content moderation, and public resource management—but it is only just beginning to realize its potential to influence practically all areas of human life, including geopolitical power balances. As these technologies advance and increasingly come to mediate our everyday lives, it becomes necessary to consider how they may reflect prevailing philosophical perspectives and preferences. We must also assess how the architectural design of AI technologies today might influence human values in the future. This step is essential in order to identify the positive opportunities presented by AI and unleash these technologies’ capabilities in the most socially advantageous way possible while being mindful of potential harms. Critics question the extent to which individual engineers and proprietors of AI should take responsibility for the direction of these developments, or whether centralized policies are needed to steer growth and incentives in the right direction. What even is the right direction? How can it be best achieved?
Princeton’s University Center for Human Values (UCHV) and the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) are excited to announce a joint research project, “The Princeton Dialogues on AI and Ethics,” in the emerging field of artificial intelligence (broadly defined) and its interaction with ethics and political theory. The aim of this project is to develop a set of intellectual reasoning tools to guide practitioners and policy makers, both current and future, in developing the ethical frameworks that will ultimately underpin their technical and legislative decisions. More than ever before, individual-level engineering choices are poised to impact the course of our societies and human values. And yet there have been limited opportunities for AI technology actors, academics, and policy makers to come together to discuss these outcomes and their broader social implications in a systematic fashion. This project aims to provide such opportunities for interdisciplinary discussion, as well as in-depth reflection.
We convened two invitation-only workshops in October 2017 and March 2018, in which philosophers, political theorists, and machine learning experts met to assess several real-world case studies that elucidate common ethical dilemmas in the field of AI. The aim of these workshops was to facilitate a collaborative learning experience which enabled participants to dive deeply into the ethical considerations that ought to guide decision-making at the engineering level and highlight the social shifts they may be affecting. The first outcomes of these deliberations have now been published in the form of case studies. To access these educational materials, please see our dedicated website https://aiethics.princeton.edu. These cases are intended for use across university departments and in corporate training in order to equip the next generation of engineers, managers, lawyers, and policy makers with a common set of reasoning tools for working on AI governance and development.
In March 2018, we also hosted a public conference, titled “AI & Ethics,” where interested academics, policy makers, civil society advocates, and private sector representatives from diverse fields came to Princeton to discuss topics related to the development and governance of AI: “International Dimensions of AI” and “AI and Its Democratic Frontiers”. This conference sought to use the ethics and engineering knowledge foundations developed through the initial case studies to inspire discussion on AI technology’s wider social effects.
This project is part of a wider effort at Princeton University to investigate the intersection between AI technology, politics, and philosophy. There is a particular emphasis on the ways in which the interconnected forces of technology and its governance simultaneously influence and are influenced by the broader social structures in which they are situated. The Princeton Dialogues on AI and Ethics makes use of the university’s exceptional strengths in computer science, public policy, and philosophy. The project also seeks opportunities for cooperation with existing projects in and outside of academia.
