By Fabio Tollon

Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI edited by Markus Dubber, Frank Pasquale and Sunit Das (2020) 896pp., $US185 (hardback) $US40 (paperback) Oxford University Press, New York, ISBN 978-0-19-006739-7

There has been an explosion of research concerned with the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). This work has been motivated by both theoretical and practical concerns. Theoretically, there is still no universally agreed definition of AI, nor do we fully understand exactly what an ‘ethics’ of AI should entail. Is ethics separate from the development of AI systems, or ought it to be internal to this process? Are questions of robot rights category mistakes, or do they represent a further justified expansion of our moral circle? Have we always been cyborgs, or does the advent of AI usher in a new age of human enhancement (or perhaps obsolescence)? Practically, there are pressing moral issues that arise in our use of data-driven AI systems. Do our algorithms mirror and reinforce our own biases, reinscribing discriminatory power structures of racial and gendered hierarchies? With the increasing ubiquity of AI in our everyday lives, is there a risk of runaway AI, where we lose meaningful control? And what about questions of granularity: does an ethics of AI look the same from a computer science, engineering, cognitive science or legal perspective? If you are seeking answers to these and other questions, Dubber, Pasquale and Das’s Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI will prove itself uniquely illuminating.

page: 211 – 215
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation Volume 37, Issue 2
SKU: 370213