Ethics in Online AI-Based Systems

Book excerpt: Recent technological advancements have deeply transformed society and the way people interact with each other. Instantaneous communication platforms have allowed connections with other people, forming global communities, and creating unprecedented opportunities in many sectors, making access to online resources more ubiquitous by reducing limitations imposed by geographical distance and temporal constrains. These technological developments bear ethically relevant consequences with their deployment, and legislations often lag behind such advancements. Because the appearance and deployment of these technologies happen much faster than legislative procedures, the way these technologies affect social interactions have profound ethical effects before any legislative regulation can be built, in order to prevent and mitigate those effects. Ethics in Online AI-Based Systems: Risks and Opportunities in Current Technological Trends features a series of reflections from experts in different fields on potential ethically relevant outcomes that upcoming technological advances could bring about in our society. Creating a space to explore the ethical relevance that technologies currently still under development could have constitutes an opportunity to better understand how these technologies could or should not be used in the future in order to maximize their ethically beneficial outcomes, while avoiding potential detrimental effects. Stimulating reflection and considerations with respect to the design, deployment and use of technology will help guide current and future technological advancements from an ethically informed position in order to ensure that, tomorrow, such advancements could contribute towards solving current global and social challenges that we, as a society, have today. This will not only be useful for researchers and professional engineers, but also for educators, policy makers, and ethicists. - Investigates how "intelligent" technological advances might be used, how they will affect social interactions, and what ethical consequences they might have for society - Identifies and reflects on questions that need to be asked before the design, deployment, and application of upcoming technological advancements, aiming to both prevent and mitigate potential risks, as well as to identify potentially ethically-beneficial opportunities - Recognizes the huge potential for ethically-relevant outcomes that technological advancements have, and take proactive steps to anticipate that they be designed from an ethically-informed position - Provides reflections that highlight the importance of the relationship between technology, their users and our society, thus encouraging informed design and educational and legislative approaches that take this relationship into account