Would You Buy a Car That’s Programmed to Kill You? | Big Think

Would You Buy a Car That’s Programmed to Kill You?

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How will the computer controlling your automated car interact with pedestrians? Who will teach robots what's socially acceptable behavior and what is not? These are the sorts of questions on the minds of people like Jerry Kaplan, who in this video offers an interesting crash course on computational ethics. Robots and machines are going to need programming that makes them cognizant of decorum, manners, and various other social nuances. And as Kaplan notes, no one is really quite certain how it's all going to be done. This is because any technology that takes accountability and decision-making away from human "operators" is innately going to be drenched in uncomfortable, uncertain philosophical dilemmas. These are big issues that require a thorough social discussion. What are we willing to accept? Where do we draw the line? There might come a day when artificial intelligence is able to answer these questions by itself. Until then, we're responsible for shaping A.I. to suit our still-to-be-determined values.

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JERRY KAPLAN:

Jerry Kaplan is widely known in the computer industry as a serial entrepreneur, inventor, scientist, and author. He is currently a Fellow at The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. He also teaches Philosophy, Ethics, and Impact of Artificial Intelligence in the Computer Science Department, Stanford University.

Kaplan co-founded several ventures including Winster.com (social games); Onsale.com (online auctions); GO Corporation (tablet computers); and Teknowledge (expert systems). He wrote a best-selling non-fiction novel entitled “Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure”, selected by Business Week as one of the top ten business books of the year, and optioned to Sony Pictures, with translations available in Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese. His latest book is titled Humans Need Not Apply.

Kaplan co-invented numerous products including the Synergy (first all-digital keyboard instrument, used for the soundtrack of the movie TRON); Lotus Agenda (first personal Information manager); PenPoint (tablet operating system used in the first smartphone, AT&T's EO 440); the GO computer (first tablet computer) and Straight Talk (Symantec Corporation's first natural language query system). He is also co-inventor of the online auction (patents now owned by eBay) and is named on 12 U.S. patents.

He has published papers in refereed journals including Artificial Intelligence, Communications of the ACM, Computer Music Journal, The American Journal of Computational Linguistics, and ACM Transactions on Database Systems.

Kaplan was awarded the 1998 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Northern California; served on the Governor’s Electronic Commerce Advisory Council Member under Pete Wilson, Governor of California (1999); and received an Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration from California International Business University, San Diego, California (2004).

He has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, Red Herring, and Upside, and is a frequent public speaker.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Jerry Kaplan: As machines become increasingly autonomous, by which I mean they can sense their environment and they can make decisions about what to do or what not to do. Of course it’s based on the programming and their experience. But we don’t have as direct control over what they do as we do today with the kinds of technology that we have. Now there’s a couple of very interesting consequences of that. One of them is that they’re going to be faced with having to make ethical decisions. I’ll call it ethics junior is just making socially appropriate decisions. So we’re taking machines and we’re putting them in situations where they’re around people. And something that we take for granted and it seems so natural that machines do not take for granted and do not find natural is the normal kinds of social courtesies and conventions that we operate by in dealing with other people. You don’t want to have a robot that’s making a delivery run down the sidewalk and everybody’s got to get out of the way. It has to be able to walk in a crowd in a socially appropriate way. Your autonomous car, right. There are lots of very interesting ethical conundrums that come up, but a lot of them are just social. Okay it pulls up to the crosswalk. Should you cross? Wait? How’s it going to signal....

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