AI & SOCIETY

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                Social choice ethics in artificial intelligence

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   AI & SOCIETY Aims and scope Submit manuscript

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   A major approach to the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) is to
   use social choice, in which the AI is designed to act according to the
   aggregate views of society. This is found in the AI ethics of “coherent
   extrapolated volition” and “bottom–up ethics”. This paper shows that
   the normative basis of AI social choice ethics is weak due to the fact
   that there is no one single aggregate ethical view of society. Instead,
   the design of social choice AI faces three sets of decisions: standing,
   concerning whose ethics views are included; measurement, concerning how
   their views are identified; and aggregation, concerning how individual
   views are combined to a single view that will guide AI behavior. These
   decisions must be made up front in the initial AI design—designers
   cannot “let the AI figure it out”. Each set of decisions poses
   difficult ethical dilemmas with major consequences for AI behavior,
   with some decision options yielding pathological or even catastrophic
   results. Furthermore, non-social choice ethics face similar issues,
   such as whether to count future generations or the AI itself. These
   issues can be more important than the question of whether or not to use
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    1. Note that while consciousness may play a role in ethics learning
       among human children, it is not essential for AI. The essential
       feature is that ethics is learned via interaction with the
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   Baum, S.D. Social choice ethics in artificial intelligence. AI & Soc
   35, 165–176 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0760-1
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     * Artificial intelligence
     * Ethics