Despite its many mundane applications, age-old stereotypes about artificial intelligence persist. Decades’ worth of films and literature have imbued our subconscious with the spectre of frightening autonomous robots. While these predictions seem unlikely to come true, the rapid advance of AI technology is certainly worthy of some level of anxiety. This week, a Google engineer was suspended after he publicly claimed that a computer chatbot he was developing was thinking and feeling like a human child.
Indeed, developing intelligent computer systems has ethical implications. Concerns centre not only around autonomy, but the displacing of workers, data privacy and AI perpetuating unconscious human bias. The decision-making of both AI technology and the people running and developing it needs moderation.
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