THE ART OF ETHICAL AI

Is the advent of AI a force for good, or a ticking time bomb?

- ZAK STOREY

IT’S FAIR TO SAY that we’ve written quite a bit about artificial intelligence over the last few months. In fact, as a whole, the industry is more fixated on the word “AI” than anything else right now. How can you use it? How much power does it require? How do LLMs work? X versus Y. There’s a lot of information, as well as some quite technological terms, to digest. Right now, as the field continues to advance, seeing how companies and applications shift and change with the movement of public opinion is fascinating. Whether that’s AMD or Intel releasing CPUs with dedicated NPUs, or system integrators focusing on their latest batch of “AI” systems, or the memory market sucking up as much NAND as it can get for massive servers, the silicon ramifications are clear.

Of course, there are also think-pieces that lean perhaps too much into the doom-mongering side of things as well. The hype pieces, we like to call them. “AI could signal the end of humanity” and so on. Articles written mostly in good faith, but often running away into worst-case scenarios, with little evidence to back it all up. But again, all of this specifically looks at the bigger picture.

Today, we’re going to take more of a focused look on some of the ethical considerations surrounding AI—how it sits from a sentience perspective, what good can be achieved through intelligent use of it, and what ethical considerations we need to make as a society with regard to its development and continued use. The question really is, what threat does AI pose if left unchecked, and how exactly can it be used as a force for good in its current iteration?

DEFINING AI

The basic definition: Is this thing conscious or not?