The Last of Us - 2025 - S02 E01

The ethics of artificial intelligence covers a broad range of topics within AI that are considered to have particular ethical stakes.[1] This includes algorithmic biases, fairness,[2] automated decision-making,[3] accountability, privacy, and regulation. It also covers various emerging or potential future challenges such as machine ethics (how to make machines that behave ethically), lethal autonomous weapon systems, arms race dynamics, AI safety and alignment, technological unemployment, AI-enabled misinformation, how to treat certain AI systems if they have a moral status (AI welfare and rights), artificial superintelligence and existential risks.[1]

Some application areas may also have particularly important ethical implications, like healthcare, education, criminal justice, or the military.

Machine ethics (or machine morality) is the field of research concerned with designing Artificial Moral Agents (AMAs), robots or artificially intelligent computers that behave morally or as though moral.[4][5][6][7] To account for the nature of these agents, it has been suggested to consider certain philosophical ideas, like the standard characterizations of agency, rational agency, moral agency, and artificial agency, which are related to the concept of AMAs.[8]

There are discussions on creating tests to see if an AI is capable of making ethical decisions. Alan Winfield concludes that the Turing test is flawed and the requirement for an AI to pass the test is too low.[9] A proposed alternative test is one called the Ethical Turing Test, which would improve on the current test by having multiple judges decide if the AI's decision is ethical or unethical.[9] Neuromorphic AI could be one way to create morally capable robots, as it aims to process information similarly to humans, nonlinearly and with millions of interconnected artificial neurons.[10] Similarly, whole-brain emulation (scanning a brain and simulating it on digital hardware) could also in principle lead to human-like robots, thus capable of moral actions.[11] And large language models are capable of approximating human moral judgments.[12] Inevitably, this raises the question of the environment in which such robots would learn about the world and whose morality they would inherit – or if they end up developing human 'weaknesses' as well: selfishness, pro-survival attitudes, inconsistency, scale insensitivity, etc.

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