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Humans are creating artificial intelligence. Machines and systems that use AI are already

making decisions that affect our lives in important ways.

So how do we build ethics into machines? And might we learn something about ethics

from AI? Peter Walton is a philosopher at the University of Michigan.

Peter Walton, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much. Very glad to be here.

The topic we're going to focus on is AI and ethics. I'm not actually sure about ethics,

but let's get clear about AI first. What are we talking about? AI is a very general term.

Well first thing for me to say is I'm not an expert on AI. I'm a philosopher who's worked

in moral philosophy and who believes that there are many ethical challenges raised by AI

and that they're coming onto us much quicker than we expected they would. And so it's important

I think for philosophers who aren't expert in AI to try to do what we can to scramble.

But AI is literally artificial intelligence. What kind of intelligence is relevant here?

Most people I think would say that the most general idea of intelligence is this capacity

to solve problems. That would mean, for example, a capacity to take what has been learned

in the past and solve new problems. So now I think a lot of people would include learning

in intelligence. A data bank just sitting there is not by itself intelligent because it's

not thinking of solutions. And it's not seeing how they work out and learning from whether

they did work out. So the systems that we're mostly thinking about now are AI systems that

...