Brian Boyd, with help from Bill Drexel and Matt Elmore, discusses the American Enterprise Institute’s approach to artificial intelligence.
What does it mean to be human?
Are we defined by our noble reason or our admirable form? Or is our capacity to love more essential? If we are making sand into machines that begin to surpass us, should that exalt us above the dust we are, or humble us even lower?
To use the most advanced models of artificial intelligence — whether in chatbots, self-driving cars, autonomous weapons systems, or protein-folding predictors — is to be both impressed by their capabilities and unsettled about our own. Ordinary citizens are asking what this means for themselves, their families, and their communities. Many ethics councils and committees have been formed at universities, government institutions, think tanks, and AI companies themselves, taking positions on practical issues like job loss, bias, and the tradeoff in AI development between speed and safety. Such concerns are vital, but they do not address the deepest questions AI is raising about human meaning and purpose.
It is these questions, and their need for Socratic consideration, that have led the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., to convene a new Council on AI Ethics. Our starting point is the jarring experience of encountering an uncanny technology that mirrors us, imitates us, and in some ways surpasses us. Before we can answer “What should we do about AI?” — the focus of most other AI councils and committees — we should first have a better grasp of the answer to “Who are we, and who do we hope to become?” In a pluralistic society, that “we” will have many different forms. Yet there are shared concerns that arise from our shared human nature. Asking the right questions leads not to a single set of right answers, but to a set of ways in which we might understand ourselves and our goals, and thus a perspective from which we can see paths forward.
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