“You are worse than a fool; you have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible.”
When William Gibson wrote those words in his groundbreaking 1984, novel Neuromancer, artificial intelligence remained almost entirely within the realm of science fiction. Today, however, the convergence of complex algorithms, big data, and exponential increases in computational power has resulted in a world where AI raises significant ethical and human rights dilemmas, involving rights ranging from the right to privacy to due process. Addressing these issues will require considerable input from experts across an extremely broad array of disciplines such as public policy, business, criminal justice, ethics, and even philosophy.
Unintended consequences result from many new inventions. AI, however, is unique in that the decisions that give rise to these consequences are often made without human input. The most severe of these potential adverse outcomes arise from systems that are designed to cause harm from the outset, such as weapons systems. Long a staple of science fiction films, weapons incorporating varying degrees of autonomous functionality have in fact existed for some time, with landmines being one of the simplest—and for human rights, most problematic—examples of this technology. Today, however, the science of AI has advanced to the point that the construction of sophisticated fully autonomous robots is a possibility. In response to this, in 2012 the “Campaign to Stop Killer Robots” was launched by a coalition of NGOs seeking to ensure that life-or-death decisions remain firmly within human hands. Although not associated with the campaign, in that same year the US Department of Defense issued Directive number 3000.09, defining its policy that fully autonomous weapon systems are only to “be used to apply non-lethal, non-kinetic force such as some forms of electronic attack.” Lethal force, according to current policy, requires human control.
