Every year, artificial intelligence increasingly affects work processes and people’s lives around the world. Technologies make adjustments to production, service, and even the routine activities of society by replacing long, complicated processes with precise, automatic, and fast actions. This case study discusses the use of artificial intelligence that brings new ethical questions and the answer to which may be needed in the coming decades.
The most relevant ethical issue is the replacement of people with robots in the workplace and the consequences that it brings today and may bring in the future. For example, Bossmann suggests that robots will be able to give freedom to people from predictable work, which will provide them with more free time. However, at the same time, it is doubtful that robots will be able to work without failures, and discrimination, since they do not have such flexibility in intelligence as humans. Harris et al. also raises this issue and refers, as well as Bossmann, to Tesla autopilot cars as their use in trucking can be dangerous and unethical. Another ethical issue is the possibility of using AI for harmful purposes, and the ability of such technologies to achieve goals the most correct but not just effective. Besides, such a replacement can deprive many people of work, while owners of companies will receive the maximum income. Therefore, the main issue is the possibility of equality in a society in which machines do the work of humans.
Therefore, this study demonstrates that artificial intelligence, which is a panacea for many people and companies today, also has many ambiguities. The ethical questions that AI raises currently do not yet require an urgent answer, since its use is limited. However, the world has already faced some of these issues, so it needs to think about their solution to avoid negative consequences in the future.
Works Cited
Harris, Charles, et al. Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases. 6th ed., Cengage Learning, 2019.
Bossmann, Julia. “Top 9 Ethical Issues in Artificial Intelligence.”World Economic Forum, 2016, Web.