‘The Algorithm Made Me Do It’: Artificial Intelligence Ethics Is Still On Shaky Ground

Joe McKendrick
Forbes.com
Originally published 22 Dec 19

Here is an excerpt:

Inevitably, “there will be lawsuits that require you to reveal the human decisions behind the design of your AI systems, what ethical and social concerns you took into account, the origins and methods by which you procured your training data, and how well you monitored the results of those systems for traces of bias or discrimination,” warns Mike Walsh, CEO of Tomorrow, and author of The Algorithmic Leader: How to Be Smart When Machines Are Smarter Than You, in a recent Harvard Business Review article. “At the very least trust, the algorithmic processes at the heart of your business. Simply arguing that your AI platform was a black box that no one understood is unlikely to be a successful legal defense in the 21st century. It will be about as convincing as ‘the algorithm made me do it.’”

It’s more than legal considerations that should drive new thinking about AI ethics. It’s about “maintaining trust between organizations and the people they serve, whether clients, partners, employees, or the general public,” a recent report out of Accenture maintains. The report’s authors, Ronald Sandler and John Basl, both with Northeastern University’s philosophy department, and Steven Tiell of Accenture, state that a well-organized data ethics capacity can help organizations manage risks and liabilities associated with such data misuse and negligence.

“It can also help organizations clarify and make actionable mission and organizational values, such as responsibilities to and respect for the people and communities they serve,” Sandler and his co-authors advocate. A data ethics capability also offers organizations “a path to address the transformational power of data-driven AI and machine learning decision-making in an anticipatory way, allowing for proactive responsible development and use that can help organizations shape good governance, rather than inviting strict oversight.”

The info is here.

Book Review: Against Absolute Goodness

By Nomy Arpaly
Notre Dame - Philosophical Review: An Electronic Journal
Book Review: Against Absolute Goodness by Richard Kraut

The obligatory joke -- this book is very good, but not absolutely so -- has essentially been made already in a blurb on the cover. In the blurb, Russ Shafer Landau says the book is excellent, and I have to agree it is. It is also very well written. With its lucid prose -- rare in a philosophy book -- it can be read in one sitting.

Kraut defends the view that there is neither absolute goodness nor absolute badness. By this he does not mean that Hitler is not an absolutely morally hideous person, nor does he mean that, as one's undergraduate students are fond of saying, it's all subjective. Kraut means that nothing should be called "good, period" or "simply good". A thing can only be good for someone or good of a kind. Thus a thing can be objectively and noninstrumentally good or bad for a person or any other creature to whose well being it makes sense to refer. Different things can be objectively, noninstrumentally good for different creatures -- I am reminded of Spinoza declaring that music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf -- but some things might be bad for a lot of creatures -- some kinds of pain are perhaps bad for all sentient beings. A thing can also be a good of a kind. For example, a thing can be a good toaster or a good tennis player. The good tennis player is not a person who possesses two qualities -- the property of being good and the property of being a tennis player (though Moore might want us to believe he does). She is a person who is good qua tennis player. Unlike other thinkers he cites, like Geach and Thomson, Kraut does not think that saying that something is "good, period" or "just plain good" is an abuse of language. He just claims that, like phlogiston, absolute goodness simply is not there, and that, just like in the case of phlogiston, it can be shown by pointing to all the work the concept of absolute goodness cannot do as well as the work it does not need to do because other concepts do it better.

The entire book review is here.