AI ETHICS

The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

A complete list of the titles in this series appears at the back of this book.
 AI ETHICS
MARK COECKELBERGH

The MIT Press | Cambridge, Massachusetts | London, England

© 2020 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by
any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or
information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the
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Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Coeckelbergh, Mark, author.

Title: AI ethics / Mark Coeckelbergh.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2020] | Series: The MIT
Press essential knowledge series | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019018827 | ISBN 9780262538190 (pbk. :
alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Artificial intelligence—Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC Q334.7 .C64 2020 | DDC 170—dc23 LC record available
at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018827

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 CONTENTS

Series Foreword vii

Acknowledgments ix

1 Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall 1

2 Superintelligence, Monsters, and the AI
Apocalypse 11
3 All about the Human 31
4 Just Machines? 47
5 The Technology 63
6 Don’t Forget the Data (Science) 83
7 Privacy and the Other Usual Suspects 97
8 A-responsible Machines and Unexplainable
Decisions 109
9 Bias and the Meaning of Life 125
10 Policy Proposals 145
11 Challenges for Policymakers 167
12 It’s the Climate, Stupid! On Priorities, the
Anthropocene, and Elon Musk’s Car in Space 183

Glossary 203
Notes 207
References 211
Further Reading 221
Index 225
 SERIES FOREWORD

The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers acces-

sible, concise, beautifully produced pocket-size books on
topics of current interest. Written by leading thinkers, the
books in this series deliver expert overviews of subjects
that range from the cultural and the historical to the sci-
entific and the technical.
In today’s era of instant information gratification, we
have ready access to opinions, rationalizations, and super-
ficial descriptions. Much harder to come by is the founda-
tional knowledge that informs a principled understanding
of the world. Essential Knowledge books fill that need.
Synthesizing specialized subject matter for nonspecialists
and engaging critical topics through fundamentals, each
of these compact volumes offers readers a point of access
to complex ideas.

Bruce Tidor
Professor of Biological Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book not only draws on my own work on this topic but
reflects the knowledge and experience of the entire field
of AI ethics. It would be impossible to list all the people I
have discussed with and learned from over the past years,
but the relevant and fast-growing communities I know in-
clude AI researchers such as Joanna Bryson and Luc Steels,
fellow philosophers of technology such as Shannon Vallor
and Luciano Floridi, academics working on responsible in-
novation in the Netherlands and the UK such as Bernd
Stahl at De Montfort University, people I met in Vienna
such as Robert Trappl, Sarah Spiekermann, and Wolfgang
(Bill) Price, and my fellow members of the policy-oriented
advisory bodies High-Level Expert Group on AI (European
Commission) and Austrian Council on Robotics and Arti-
ficial Intelligence, for example Raja Chatila, Virginia Dig-
num, Jeroen van den Hoven, Sabine Köszegi, and Matthias
Scheutz—to name just a few. I would also like to warmly
thank Zachary Storms for helping with proofreading and
formatting, and Lena Starkl and Isabel Walter for support
with literature search.
 1

MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL

The AI Hype and Fears: Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who

Is the Smartest of Us All?

When the results are announced, Lee Sedol’s eyes swell

with tears. AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence (AI) devel-
oped by Google’s DeepMind, just secured a 4–1 victory
in the game Go. It is March 2016. Two decades earlier,
chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov lost to the machine
Deep Blue, and now a computer program had won against
eighteen-time world champion Lee Sedol in a complex
game that was seen as one that only humans could play,
using their intuition and strategic thinking. The computer
won not by following rules given to it by programmers
but by means of machine learning based on millions of
past Go matches and by playing against itself. In such a
case, programmers prepare the data sets and create the
algorithms, but cannot know which moves the program
will come up with. The AI learns by itself. After a num-
ber of unusual and surprising moves, Lee had to resign
(Borowiec 2016).
An impressive achievement by the AI. But it also raises
concerns. There is admiration for the beauty of the moves,
but also sadness, even fear. There is the hope that even
smarter AIs could help us to revolutionize health care or
find solutions for all kinds of societal problems, but also
the worry that machines will take over. Could machines
outsmart us and control us? Is AI still a mere tool, or is
it slowly but surely becoming our master? These fears re-
mind us of the words of the AI computer HAL in Stanley
Kubrick’s science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, who
in response to the human command to “Open the pod bay
doors” answers: “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”. And if
not fear, there may be a feeling of sadness or disappoint-
ment. Darwin and Freud dethroned our feelings of excep-
tionalism, our feelings of superiority, and our fantasies
of control; today, artificial intelligence seems to deal yet
another blow to humanity’s self-image. If a machine can
do this, what is left for us? What are we? Are we just ma-
chines? Are we inferior machines, with too many bugs?
What is to become of us? Will we become the slaves of ma-
chines? Or worse, a mere energy resource, as in the film
The Matrix?

2 CHAPTER 1
The Real and Pervasive Impact of AI

But the breakthroughs of artificial intelligence are not

limited to games or the realm of science fiction. AI is al-
ready happening today and it is pervasive, often invisibly
embedded in our day-to-day tools and as part of complex
technological systems (Boddington 2017). Given the expo-
nential growth of computer power, the availability of (big)
data due to social media and the massive use of billons
of smartphones, and fast mobile networks, AI, especially
machine learning, has made significant progress. This has
enabled algorithms to take over many of our activities, in-
cluding planning, speech, face recognition, and decision
making. AI has applications in many domains, including
transport, marketing, health care, finance and insurance,
security and the military, science, education, office work
and personal assistance (e.g., Google Duplex1), entertain-
ment, the arts (e.g., music retrieval and composition), ag-
riculture, and of course manufacturing.
AI is created and used by IT and internet companies.
For example, Google has always used AI for its search en-
gine. Facebook uses AI for targeted advertising and photo
tagging. Microsoft and Apple use AI to power their digi-
tal assistants. But the application of AI is wider than the
IT sector defined in a narrow sense. For example, there
are many concrete plans for, and experiments with, self-
driving cars. This technology is also based on AI. Drones

MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL 3