The ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) have become a matter of public concern. According to a recent Stanford report, the number of research papers in the area given at major conferences such as the annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems has increased fivefold since 2014, and ethics officers now abound at global technology firms (Moss and Metcalf 2020). Such major institutions as the US government, the United Nations, and the Vatican have articulated visions for so-called ethical AI.
By AI ethics here I mean the study of how human values both shape and are shaped by the development of AI technologies. This definition is capacious: it includes the design and deployment of these systems with human values in mind; assessments and activism around the societal impacts of said technologies and their imbrications within existing asymmetries of power, justice, and equality; and the wider relationship between computing technologies and...
