Ethics and Artificial Intelligence; Paving the Way for Quantum Computing’s Ethics?
With science fiction coming to reality, as in the case of AI, ethical questions are making headlines. Are we too late or is the time right to hold talks and enable international norms, establish ethical AI principles, and develop governance over this powerful and potentially dangerous technology?
Greg Satell, writing for innovation EXCELLENCE, speaks briefly on this topic but asks pertinent questions, “This [AI] opens up a significant number of ethical dilemmas. If given a choice to protect a passenger or a pedestrian, which should be encoded into the software of a autonomous car? Who gets to decide which factors are encoded into systems that make decisions about our education, whether we get hired or if we go to jail? How will these systems be trained? We all worry about who’s educating our kids, who’s teaching our algorithms?”
Further, he points out “What’s striking about the moral and ethical issues of both artificial intelligence and genomics is that they have no precedent, save for science fiction. We are in totally uncharted territory. Nevertheless, it is imperative that we develop a consensus about what principles should be applied, in what contexts and for what purpose.”
Shouldn’t we be looking at all disruptive technologies in the ethical and moral light? For AI, the ship is setting sail. For quantum computing, the ship’s keel is in the design phase. Perhaps with quantum community initiative, an ethical framework could be designed ahead of the arrival of fully functional quantum computers. Until then, keeping involved in any AI ethics framework may turn some value in applying to quantum computing and vice versa. Qubit.