---
title: "Ethics of artificial intelligence"
chunk: 7/12
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelligence"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:23:03.965241+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

A customer service representative (AI technology is already used today for telephone-based interactive voice response systems)
A nursemaid for the elderly (as was reported by Pamela McCorduck in her book The Fifth Generation)
A soldier
A judge
A police officer
A therapist (as was proposed by Kenneth Colby in the 1970s)
Weizenbaum says that humans require authentic feelings of empathy from people in these positions. If machines replace humans, we will find ourselves alienated, devalued and frustrated, for the AI system would not be able to simulate empathy. Artificial intelligence, if used in this way, represents a threat to human dignity. Weizenbaum argues that the fact that we are entertaining the possibility of machines in these positions suggests that we have experienced an "atrophy of the human spirit that comes from thinking of ourselves as computers."
Pamela McCorduck counters that, speaking for women and minorities "I'd rather take my chances with an impartial computer", arguing that there are conditions where it would preferable to have automated judges and police that have no personal agenda at all. However, Kaplan and Haenlein stressed in 2019 that such AI systems are only as smart as the data used to train them since they are, in their essence, nothing more than fancy curve-fitting machines; using AI to support a court ruling can be highly problematic if past rulings show bias toward certain groups since those biases get formalized and ingrained, which makes them even more difficult to spot and fight against.
Weizenbaum was also bothered that AI researchers (and some philosophers) were willing to view the human mind as nothing more than a computer program (a position now known as computationalism). To Weizenbaum, these points suggest that AI research devalues human life.
AI founder John McCarthy objects to the moralizing tone of Weizenbaum's critique. "When moralizing is both vehement and vague, it invites authoritarian abuse", he writes. Bill Hibbard writes that "Human dignity requires that we strive to remove our ignorance of the nature of existence, and AI is necessary for that striving."

=== Liability for self-driving cars ===

As the widespread use of autonomous cars becomes increasingly imminent, new challenges raised by fully autonomous vehicles must be addressed. There have been debates about the legal liability of the responsible party if these cars get into accidents. In one report where a driverless car hit a pedestrian, the driver was inside the car but the controls were fully in the hand of computers. This led to a dilemma over who was at fault for the accident.
In another incident on March 18, 2018, Elaine Herzberg was struck and killed by a self-driving Uber in Arizona. In this case, the automated car was capable of detecting cars and certain obstacles in order to autonomously navigate the roadway, but it could not anticipate a pedestrian in the middle of the road. This raised the question of whether the driver, pedestrian, the car company, or the government should be held responsible for her death.
Currently, self-driving cars are considered semi-autonomous, requiring the driver to pay attention and be prepared to take control if necessary. Thus, it falls on governments to regulate drivers who over-rely on autonomous features and to inform them that these are just technologies that, while convenient, are not a complete substitute. Before autonomous cars become widely used, these issues need to be tackled through new policies.
Experts contend that autonomous vehicles ought to be able to distinguish between rightful and harmful decisions since they have the potential of inflicting harm. The two main approaches proposed to enable smart machines to render moral decisions are the bottom-up approach, which suggests that machines should learn ethical decisions by observing human behavior without the need for formal rules or moral philosophies, and the top-down approach, which involves programming specific ethical principles into the machine's guidance system. However, there are significant challenges facing both strategies: the top-down technique is criticized for its difficulty in preserving certain moral convictions, while the bottom-up strategy is questioned for potentially unethical learning from human activities.

=== Weaponization ===