Viewing AI as a panacea obscures existing violence/inequalities

(Abeba, CompSci@Dublin, Jelle, Management@Twente, Robot Rights? Let’s Talk about Human Welfare Instead https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.05046.pdf)

Discussions of robot ethics, by portraying robots as intelligent systems as our primary concern, downplays the fact that we are currently amid artificially intelligent systems rapidly infiltrating every aspect of life. The real and urgent issues that are emerging with the mass deployment of seemingly invisible AI systems need to be discussed now because they currently impact large groups of people. The mass deployment of machines and AI today should propel us to examine commercial drives behind these machines as well as the harm and injustice the integration of machines into society brings. From perpetuation of historical and social bias and injustice [6, 19, 31] to invasion of privacy [43] to exploitation of human labour [38], often for financial gains for private corporates, AI systems stand in opposition to human welfare. When AI systems are deployed and integrated into our day-to-day lives without critical examination and anticipation of emerging side-effects, they pose threats to human well-being. With the rise of machine learning, there is an increased appetite to hand much of our social, political and economical problems over to machines bringing with it corporate greed at the expense of human welfare and integrity [43]. For the corporate world which produces a great proportion of current AI, profit marks its central objective, while for those deploying such technologies in various social sectors, AI seemingly provides a quick and cost-efficient solution to complex and messy social problems. However, the integration of these systems is proving to be a threat to people’s welfare, integrity and privacy, especially those socioeconomically disadvantaged [1, 30, 31]. We discuss a number of these threats below.