Introduction
Nowadays, the technology of artificial intelligence (AI) is applied in various spheres of human life. This technology is already deeply in everyday life through smartphones, personal assistants, drones, not to mention autonomous cars, and robots. Technological progress advances and allows people to increasingly use AI capabilities, but this concept is also related to many ethical issues about humans’ rights and their usefulness to society. The most worrying of them are the decline of the job roles value and all-encompassing surveillance that encroaches on individuals’ civil liberties and contradicts ethical principles. Given the trend towards the automation of manual labor, in the near future, many people are at risk of becoming unemployed and will have to take professional training to meet society’s changing technologically-conditioned needs. Combined with an increase in surveillance, which can significantly affect human life perception, AI poses a potential threat to liberties and ethical values.
Ethical Concerns
The progress of society and the development of technology are associated with the desire of people to facilitate manual labor, in which AI is of great assistance. However, considering the virtue ethics concepts, the work contributes to forming positive moral character traits in human life. At the same time, with AI implementation in industrial practices, a considerable part of society will lose their value as workers because their professions will be redundant (Desmond, 2020). Thus, people will lose not only job opportunities but also ways to develop virtuous qualities. Virtue ethics are also tied to data privacy concerns, as AI potentially increases the data flow volumes and the number of malicious users and reduces security (Shneiderman, 2021). Both creators and users risk losing the opportunity to develop virtuous qualities due to the desire for profit or the decline in the value of the personality.
Restricting freedom of expression and privacy can lead to the management of moral norms, which prevents the development of the virtuous qualities and their own moral values of people. It is related to the fact that algorithms are often used to track the prohibited behavior on the particular platform, eliminating violators’ profiles or limiting their activity (Vimalkumar, 2021). Additionally, AIs can be programmed to identify certain patterns of communication, which can lead to disruption of online communication and discrimination. In terms of data privacy, AI is widely used to track people’s behavior on the Internet, which also carries the risk of data leakage (Morris, 2020). Thus, not only the ethical but also legal rights of users can be violated.
Initiative Proposed
Protecting the ethical values of society is a priority for the state and government. The government should pass legislation that requires all the organizations which plan to implement AI systems to gain the ethical certificate, which is given after getting more than 75 percent in the ethics evaluation. The difficulties of implementing this initiative are associated with the need to develop universal restrictions on the use of AI and a significant investment. A virtue ethic or other ethical concept underpinning technology assessment can discourage misuse for commercial gain. The proposed policy could greatly limit the potential uses of AI and help maintain ethical values.
References
Desmond, N. (2020). The threat of artificial intelligence. First Things.
Morris, M. R. (2021). Viewpoint AI and accessibility: A discussion of ethical considerations. Communications of the ACM, 63(6), 35-37.
Vimalkumar, M., Sharma, S. K., Singh, J. B., & Dwivedi, Y. K. (2021). ‘Okay google, what about my privacy?’: User’s privacy perceptions and acceptance of voice based digital assistants. Computers in Human Behavior, 120, 1-2.
Shneiderman, B. (2021). Human-centered AI. Issues in Science & Technology, 37(2), 56-62.