Artificial intelligence, explanations, trust, responsibility, and justice

There have been several challenges to our view of our position and purpose as human beings. The scientist Charles Darwin’s research demonstrated evolutionary links between man and other animals. Psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud illuminated the power of the subconscious. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have challenged our identity as the species with the greatest ability to think. Whether machines can now ‘think’ is no longer interesting. What is important is to critically consider the degree to which they are called upon to make decisions and act in significant and often life-critical situations. We have already discussed the increasing roles of AI in intelligent tutoring, medicine, news stories and fake news, autonomous weapons, smart cars, and automation. Chapter 11 focuses on other ways in which our lives are changing because of advances in AI, and the accompanying opportunities and risks. AI has seen a paradigm shift since the year 2000. Prior to this, the focus was on knowledge representation and the modelling of human expertise in particular domains, in order to develop expert systems that could solve problems and carry out rudimentary tasks. Now, the focus is on the neural networks capable of machine learning (ML). The most successful approach is deep learning, whereby complex hierarchical assemblies of processing elements ‘learn’ using millions of samples of training data. They can then often make correct decisions in new situations. We shall also present a radical, and for most of us a scary, concept of AI with no limits—the technological singularity or superintelligence. Even though superintelligence is for now sciencefiction, humanity is asking if there is any limit to machine intelligence. We shall therefore discuss the social and ethical consequences of widespread use of ML algorithms. It is helpful in this analysis to better understand what intelligence is, so we present two insightful formulations of the concept developed by renowned psychologists.