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Toward an Ethics of AI Assistants: an Initial Framework

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Abstract

Personal AI assistants are now nearly ubiquitous. Every leading smartphone operating system comes with a personal AI assistant that promises to help you with basic cognitive tasks: searching, planning, messaging, scheduling and so on. Usage of such devices is effectively a form of algorithmic outsourcing: getting a smart algorithm to do something on your behalf. Many have expressed concerns about this algorithmic outsourcing. They claim that it is dehumanising, leads to cognitive degeneration, and robs us of our freedom and autonomy. Some people have a more subtle view, arguing that it is problematic in those cases where its use may degrade important interpersonal virtues. In this article, I assess these objections to the use of AI assistants. I will argue that the ethics of their use is complex. There are no quick fixes or knockdown objections to the practice, but there are some legitimate concerns. By carefully analysing and evaluating the objections that have been lodged to date, we can begin to articulate an ethics of personal AI use that navigates those concerns. In the process, we can locate some paradoxes in our thinking about outsourcing and technological dependence, and we can think more clearly about what it means to live a good life in the age of smart machines.

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Notes

  1. The quotes come from John McCarthy ‘What is Artificial Intelligence? Basic Questions’ available at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/node1.html – note that this quote and the quote from Russell and Norvig was originally sourced through Scherer 2016

  2. Indeed, this literature is explicitly invoked by many of the critics of AI assistance e.g. Carr 2014, Krakauer 2016, and Crawford 2015.

  3. A reviewer wonders, for example, why I do not discuss the consequences of using AI assistants to outsource moral decision-making. There are several reasons for this. The most pertinent is that I have discussed moral outsourcing as a specific problem in another paper (Danaher 2016b) and, as I point out in that paper, I suspect discussions of moral outsourcing to AI will raise similar issues to those already discussed in the expansive literature on the use of enhancement technologies to improve moral decision-making (for a similar analysis, coupled with a defence of the use of AI moral assistance, see Giublini and Savulescu 2018). That said, some of what I say below about degeneration, autonomy and interpersonal virtue will be also be relevant to debates about the use of moral AI assistance.

  4. I am indebted to Miles Brundage for suggesting this line of argument to me. We write about it in more detail on my webpage: https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2017/05/cognitive-scarcity-and-artificial.html

  5. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the distinction between personalization and manipulation. As they pointed out, personalization also has costs, e.g. a filter bubble that serves to reinforce prejudices, that may not be desirable in a pluralistic, democratic society, but it’s not clear that those problems are best understood in terms of a threat to autonomy. Cass Sunstein’s #Republic (2017) explores the political fallout of filter bubbles in more detail.

  6. As Hare and Vincent point out, while humans may be bad at predicting whether a future option will makes us happy, our judgment as to whether a chosen option has made us happy is, effectively, incorrigible. Nobody knows better than ourselves. It is to this latter type of judgment that I appeal in this argument.

  7. As a reviewer points out, it may be impossible for interpersonal communication to ever adequately capture one’s true feelings. This may well be right but if so it would seem to be a problem for both automated and non-automated communications alike.

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  1. School of Law, NUI Galway, University Road, Galway, Ireland

    John Danaher

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  1. John Danaher
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Danaher, J. Toward an Ethics of AI Assistants: an Initial Framework. Philos. Technol. 31, 629–653 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0317-3

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