Chief visionary officer & co-founder, Mind Your Privacy
"Ethical concerns will only be taken into consideration if it makes financial sense. As the data market builds, are tech companies optimising for their own benefit or those of their clients? Companies should take responsibility for their role in the data ecosystem, making sure data flow vs responsibility are in equilibrium.
"My hope lies in the European General Data Protection Regulation, effective by 2018, which sets a baseline for compliance. If tech companies can help their clients make ethical decisions about their data uses, we are on the right track."
Director of research, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University
With the ability to sequence our DNA, we have become data - but what if we start creating a super race of humans or new species of plants and animals? Robots are beginning to take away jobs that require physical labour.
"But what about when knowledge-based jobs start disappearing? Will a robot be allowed to defend itself from an attacker - or its owner? Will we give them the right to vote?"
Executive director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
"If an infirm senior refuses to take her pills, how coercive should her care-taking robot be? If your self-driving car is about to hit a child, should it drive you into a wall instead? We are barely clear about how to frame these moral questions for our fellow humans, much less how to program them into software.
"But ethics isn't really the responsibility of the tech industry. It is a responsibility of citizens and governments."
Senior fellow; head of the Geopolitics and Global Futures, Geneva Centre for Security PolicyTech developers should confront two questions: does the technology go against human dignity? Does it imperil humanity in the long run? If no ethical standards are put in place, a disproportionate amount of control is granted to AIs.
"Or take cognitive enhancement: left unchecked, it could lead humanity into the gradual loss of characteristics that make us 'human'.
Lecturer in robot ethics, philosophy department at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada
“In order to interact socially with humans, robots and AIs will have to 'know' how to act ethically. How do we decide if a robot should ever deceive a human? In a co-operative robot-human interaction, how much control should we delegate to the robot?
"These questions will have profound impacts, yet remain unanswered. Getting it right will require ethics expertise in engineering and design."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
