AI has social consequences, but who pays the price? Tech companies' problem with 'ethical debt'

• But inside tech companies themselves, the sentiment is quite the opposite.
• In other words, it’s time to “move fast and break things,” to quote Mark Zuckerberg’s old motto.
• Of course, when you break things, you might have to fix them later – at a cost.
• And with ethical debt in particular, the people who incur it are rarely the people who pay for it in the end.

Off to the races

• Within months, Google and Microsoft released their own generative AI programs, which seemed rushed to market in an effort to keep up.
• Google’s stock prices fell when its chatbot Bard confidently supplied a wrong answer during the company’s own demo.
• Yet early conversations with the AI-powered Bing left some users unsettled, and it has repeated known misinformation.
• After all, even with ethical guidelines in place, it’s not as if OpenAI, Microsoft or Google can see the future.

Speculating – responsibly

• So how can AI designers learn to think more like science fiction writers?
• One of my current research projects focuses on developing ways to support this process of ethical speculation.
• Often these discussions are based on patterns from the past or the potential for bad actors.
• The next steps for my research are to translate these ethical speculation strategies for real-world technology design teams.

Time to hit pause?

• Unchecked, AI development “might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us,” or even cause a “loss of control of our civilization,” its writers warned.
• As critiques of the letter point out, this focus on hypothetical risks ignores actual harms happening today.