Rare Opportunity or History Revisited? The Pitfalls and Prospects of Ethical AI in Light of Public Ethical Responses to the Telegraph

This article undertakes a comparative ethical analysis of the types of public expectations and concerns related to the development of two technologies: the telegraph and artificial intelligence. For each technology I provide a historical survey of public ethical expectations and concerns followed by a survey of the outcome or results of those expectations. Expectations and concerns of the telegraph era public are drawn together from popular and public literature and regulation of the period, whereas the expectations and concerns of our contemporary public AI engagement are drawn both from popular literature and public surveys, and supported by a manual search and ranking of a number of ethics related terms found in the raw feedback of the Stakeholder Consultation on the EU Commission High Level Expert Group Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. I then go on to compare those results, highlighting the similarities and differences between the two technologies, in particular the positive economic and socially responsible use expectations outcomes and the negative concerns regarding monopoly, regulation, and control. Finally, I argue that, taking the telegraph outcome as a guide, an ethical focus on accentuating positive expectations toward AI is more likely to produce definite results than concentrating upon prohibitory and negative approaches.