Is Ethical A.I. Even Possible?

The other thing AI is about is cost and perhaps secrecy. Turk system requires many people who need to be fed, that puts a pretty high low bar on price. It also requires disseminating data to many agents, each of whom could leak it.

Being more accessible means more Bad Guys (unethical actors) using it.

If you consider there are many situations where the taking of a life is considered politically or economically expedient, ethically justified, or a social or cultural necessity, the ethics of life-taking become a lot less straightforward.

One of the greatest potential benefits of AI is that having to define our ethics explicitly, instead of wrapping them up in layers of propaganda, manipulation, and self-serving lies, has the potential to transform society.

It's currently a very remote potential, but it does exist.

However, the issue is that it's very culturally dependent on WHY it's seen as wrong, and it's the reason behind WHY something is seen as wrong that the more complex elements of ethics are built on.

A utilitarian vs a deontologist vs a virtue theorist vs a follower of almost any religion vs a supporter of god knows how many other moral theories I don't know about would all have a different answer to that, and different answers to which cases killing or stealing or anything else might potentially be justified/right.

And you can see that reflected in legal systems of different countries right now. Some countries have self defence as basically 'anything is permissible if they're intruding on your property' where some have it so you need to use reasonable force. Some countries consider it fair to let the government kill criminals via the death penalty, and others don't.

The difficulty isn't defining whether murder or theft or what not in its most blatant forms is wrong, since most ethical frameworks will state it is. It's trying to define the many, many edge cases that people don't agree on, and which many countries/states/societies take different approaches to.

   No it's not. There are cases where taking a human life is considered acceptable and ethical. Killing an abductor that threatens to kill many people and negotiations have failed  is considered ethical and not punishable by law.
   Now if you assume that murder is the case where an unlawful act happened then you've stopped querying for ethics and your question becomes what is lawful which is again extremely ill-defined.

Or a fax machine.

Or broccoli.

Or a pencil.

(Yeah, you could stab someone in the eye with the latter, but it's not something inherently violent about a pencil more than 2000 other things you could do it with, and most people would never do anything like that despite having used one).

Other things however, are either precisely made for harm and profit (e.g. a grenade, or "Hot Pockets"), or lend themselves very well to it (e.g. dynamite, internet cookies, etc.).

A gun's purpose is to shoot bullets. A syringe has the purpose of delivering fluid into the human body. It's not hard to evaluate the ethics of the most common actions for each of those. While the tool itself technically has no ethics, owning or using the tool tends to have ethical implications. In a practical world, it is very fair to evaluate those implications, at least at an estimation level.

Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of complexity when it comes to tools and ethics and no easy answers, and with the luddite example it brings in questions of work ethics and societal structure, so the loom doesn't exist in a vacuum. But not all tools bring in the entirety of ethics into consideration. There are ethical estimations of tools (think of them as potential ethical energy) that we can try to estimate. Syringe > Gun seems like one we can make. Gun vs Nuke, a bit harder due to the consideration of use vs threat of use. The loom alone is pretty neutral and is far more reflective of direct context, where the context of a gun or syringe generalizes easier. And of course these are all my calculations, and you and others can have different ones, but I think if we really decided to spend 8 hours nailing down this discussion, you would indeed see a loose tiering/ranking of tools and "potential ethical energy". I wouldn't be surprised to see other measures/categories emerge either such as severity, risk, and commonality of use case.

The question becomes this: what is the "potential ethical energy" of AI. IMO it's very close to the loom in that the context matters the most, but there's also a severity of effect factor in play that makes it more dangerous. Still, I would say AI has an overall positive potential ethical energy.

A gun is not something that can be held ethically responsible itself because it does not make decisions. An autonomous gun turret would be.

Is Instagram inherently evil? Obviously not; but through the lens of pre-existing human social dynamics, including status competition, mating drives, social signaling, etc, the capabilities introduced by that particular tool almost inevitably lead to the perverse incentives of lifestyle facades, “influencers”, Fyre Festival, etc. Do we have to do these things? Of course not. But it’s naive to not think about the “realpolitik” scenarios, and what could be done to mitigate them, rather than assuming perfectly ethical and rational actors.

What makes AI even more complicated than previous technological changes to our game landscape, is the potential not for new tools, but for new players: at best, these artificial players are proxies for each of our interests (though see the side effects of “flash crashes” from high-frequency trading bots); at worst, we may have to contend with vastly intelligent new players with emergent interests of their own, which we can’t necessarily predict. While I don’t think it’s inconceivable that A.I. will always be subject to human understanding and control, we’re in such new territory that that’s fundamentally an assumption (see the arguments from Bostrom, etc).

For one, that argument only holds for tools without conscience (e.g. a hammer or a headphone). AI, though, is precisely the kind of tool that can be capable to have ethics.

Second, even dumb tools without ethics of their own, can be ethically problematic (e.g. a bomb).

The point is that agents that operate ethically need not be sentient, they just need to play faithfully in our rule sets.

Which will sometimes mean eschewing maxima when doing so violates them. It will sometimes mean losses or ties in zero sum games.

So ... no.

A person can absolve their own sense of guilt by saying that they were just following instructions. But the farmer still chose here to use the AI, or to implement its recommendations. A person can even talk themselves out of feeling guilty for a bad choice just by saying "I felt so strongly, I couldn't do anything differently". Some choice was still made by the person; they bear the responsibility even if they don't think they do.