Professionals:
- Are experts and commit to staying up-to-date
- Use their expertise responsibility for the greater good
- Self regulate
- Have professional obligations (duties) that do not depend on personal moral positions
- Must act ethically and abide by the standards set by the profession as the whole
Lessons from 737 MAX: need for broader focus on moral courage in ethics education.
Common rules:
- Public interest: in the course of engineering activities
- Take reasonable steps to safeguard public interest
- Have regards to effects on environment
- Report adverse consequences
- Act competently
- Ensure knowledge and skills up to date
- Only in your area of competence
- Allow others to misrepresent their competence
- Personal conduct
- Act honestly, objectively, with integrity
- Respect others
- Disclose conflicts of interest
- Confidentiality
- Unless it breaks other rules, must be by law, or is publicly available
Codes of conducts aren’t worth the paper they’re written on if is not enforced.
AI and Robotics
UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Council:
- Robots should not be designed as weapons
- Except for national security
- Robots should be designed to comply with existing laws
- Robots are products and hence should be designed to be safe and secure
- Robots are manufactured artifacts; it should not use the illusion of emotions and intent to exploit vulnerable users
- It should be possible to find out who is responsible for any robot
Google:
- AI should be socially beneficial (utilitarianism) - proceed where likely benefits substantially exceed foreseeable risks and downsides
- Will not pursue:
- Technologies likely to cause overall harm
- Weapons or technologies where the principle purpose is to harm people
- Surveillance technologies violating internationally-accepted norms
- Technologies that contravene widely accepted principles of international law or human rights
Lots of wiggle room.