Bloggers note: The following post illustrates the challenge in creating ethics for AI. There are many different faiths, with different belief systems. How would the AI be programmed to serve these diverse ethical needs? 

The ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) has drawn comments from the White House and British House of Commons in recent weeks, along with a nonprofit organization established by Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft. Now, Baptist computer scientists have called Christians to join the discussion.

Louise Perkins, professor of computer science at California Baptist University, told Baptist Press she is “quite worried” at the lack of an ethical code related to AI. The Christian worldview, she added, has much to say about how automated devices should be programmed to safeguard human flourishing.

Individuals with a Christian worldview need to be involved in designing and programing AI systems, Perkins said, to help prevent those systems from behaving in ways that violate the Bible’s ethical standards.

Believers can thus employ “the mathematics or the logic we will be using to program these devices” to “infuse” a biblical worldview “into an [AI] system.” 

Perkins also noted that ethical standards will have to be programmed into AI systems involved in surgery and warfare among other applications. A robot performing surgery on a pregnant woman, for instance, could have to weigh the life of the baby relative to the life of the mother, and an AI weapon system could have to apply standards of just warfare.

Source: The Pathway