Will AI ever be ethical? Here's Megatron's reply in an Oxford Union debate

Trained on massive real-world data, Megatron the AI handles motions nimbly but was stumped on a telling point.

A robot plays the piano at the Apsara Conference, a cloud computing and AI conference, in Hangzhou, China, on Oct 19, 2021. PHOTO: AFP
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Not a day passes without a fascinating snippet on the ethical challenges created by "black box" artificial intelligence systems. These use machine learning to figure out patterns within data and make decisions - often without a human giving them any moral basis for how to do it.

Classics of the genre are the credit cards accused of awarding bigger loans to men than women, based simply on which gender got the best credit terms in the past. Or the recruitment AIs that discovered the most accurate tool for candidate selection was to find CVs containing the phrase "field hockey" or the first name "Jared".

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