Floridi Redefines Evil: An Oxford Philosopher's Analysis of Intelligent Warfare

We’ve all seen hit flicks such as Terminator and wondered how we’d measure up against rogue, omnipotent demi-robots resulting from an overly ambitious programming team with a desire for military superiority. With unforeseen developments in the area of intelligent warfare, should we start our search to protect modern-day John Connor, or simply halt development of modern weaponry due to it’s clear breach of moral responsibility?

To try and save humanity from resembling a figment of James Cameron’s imagination, notorious Oxford philosopher Luciano Floridi has teamed up with fellow researcher J.W. Sanders to address the morality of emerging warfare in their paper “Artificial evil and the foundation of computer ethics” (2001). The English duo asserts how the concept of evil has been previously separated into two roots; human engineered and naturally occuring. However, with the rise of artificial intelligence, the two devise a new categorical evil - one reserved simply for beings without a heart, but a CPU. They further expand this notion of cyber evil as unique but are quick to imply us in its origin, illustrating how the emergence of artificial intelligence is impossible without human involvement.

Looking around, it’s hard to counter this sense of responsibility. In the interest of counterterrorism, we’ve developed the potential to eliminate a target thousands of miles away with only a single photograph of their appearance. When these missions go awry, like the 160 Pakistani children unintentionally killed by drones during George Bush’s aerial campaign1, it is us holding the remote that caused their demise, further solidifying Floridi’s argument about the involvement of man in the rise of the machine.

However, despite these technical mishaps and ethical blunders, nearly every global actor has dabbled in intelligent warfare for strategic purposes, with Russia going as far as to develop land robots equipped with turrets for arms and an autonomous “search-and-destroy” mode2. This particular innovation is the most disturbing, as it portrays a sense of distance from evil by humans who are technically not pulling the trigger. Floridi, however, knows this physical distance does not represent a moral one, and we are approaching an era that compromises our morality further than ever before. Whether or not you agree with Floridi’s assessment and the subsequent de-escalation of advanced weaponry, it’s officially time to say “hasta la vista” to traditional warfare as we know it.

                    Our future, if we’re not careful. One day, she’ll know the answer.

Ethics and Artificial Intelligence

Bioethics and Environmental Ethics claim that bio-entities and ecosystems, or any form of life, are intrinsically worthy of life. Bring in Information Ethics, and this even includes that anything being or information is intrinsically worthy. This brought me to think about one of my favorite films, Ex Machina, and the display, or lack thereof, of ethical actions throughout the film.

Ava from Ex-Machina

[SPOILER ALERT] The film is about a sentient AI named Ava who was created by Nathan. It is revealed that Nathan treats her extremely unethically, and she eventually outsmarts Nathan and Caleb, a coder who is testing her intelligence and falls in love with her. Ava eventually uses Caleb's love for her to escape the lab and enter the real world where she believes she belongs.

Jimmy and Sophia play Rock, Paper, Scissors.

This idea of a fully sentient AI robot may seem far-fetched, but it could be around the corner. Hanson Robotics is working on Sophia, a humanoid robot built to mimic human behavior, and is an actual citizen of Saudi Arabia. Although this is a new field, the ethics surrounding any instance of being has been discussed since Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophers. Floridi explains how these philosophers set forth that simply being or any instance of information deserves to flourish in a way that is appropriate.

In the case of Ex Machina, I believe Ava was most definitely a sentient moral agent. She was an individual and human-based, or at least “reducible to an identifiable aggregation of human beings”. Less so with Sophia who even still is a moral agent, and even less so with my old Tamagotchi which was arguably being. But I don’t think it was unethical of me when my Tamagotchi died due to my disregard for mealtime. Or that I leave Alexa on my bookshelf all day, every day.

Although maybe far in the future, the creation of moral agents like Sophia brings up important ethical discussions and responsibilities that must be had. Ex Machina has warned us about the consequences if they are ignored.

Who Lives? Who Dies? Your car will decide.

Let’s jump 50 years into the future: everyone has self-driving cars now, and oh man they are cool. After class, you take a relaxing ride back to your house in your self-driving car, but on the way home your car’s brakes fail! With an intersection quickly approaching, and no foreseeable way to save everyone in this scenario, your car has a very important decision to make.

Your car can either: 
A. Continue through the intersection, saving yourself, but killing one street-crossing pedestrian.
B. Swerve into a barrier, saving the pedestrian, but killing you, the passenger.

As the passenger in this scenario, what would you want your car to do?

Personally, I would want my self-driving car to save itself and its owner, killing the pedestrian in this scenario. But what if the pedestrian was a child? Or a homeless person? Or a doctor? Or what if there are three pedestrians? What about the scenario shown below?

5 people are inside the car, 5 people are in the crosswalk,
the pedestrians are illegally crossing the street on a red signal.

These dilemmas are variations of the classic trolley problem, but now the stakes are much higher, and the scenarios could be happening daily. In 2070, we will be expecting our self-driving cars to make these kinds of moral decisions on the spot, but without a strong ethical and moral foundation for decision-making, the car would likely just choose whichever option saves the most people, which is not always viewed as the most ethical move. This the dilemma that Luciano Floridi and J.W. Sanders realized in their 2004 article, On the morality of artificial agents. Frances Grodzinsky built on their ideas in his 2008 paper, Ethics of Designing Artificial Agents, where he directly talks about how developers should ethically implement their artificial intelligences with learning and intentionality to develop a morally motivated artificial intelligence.

This is the problem that researchers at MIT set out to solve in 2016, and they ended up creating the Moral Machine, an online experiment that was designed to create a human foundation for moral decision-making in autonomous vehicles. Since the release of the Moral Machine onto the internet, over 40 million decisions have been recorded in ten languages from people in 233 countries and regions. Using machine learning, MIT’s Moral Machine has now formed a strong basis on which to make educated, ethical decisions about who lives and who dies. I highly recommend heading to the Moral Machine website and judging a full set of 13 scenarios. At the end, the machine will output an in depth breakdown of your decision-making preferences. Here’s my report, comment your report links below!