The Challenges Of Building An Ethical Machine

Academics worry how A.I. will be programmed to navigate ethical dilemmas. Founders of A.I.-driven companies dont. But they should.

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Stefan Heck, the CEO of Bay Area-based Nauto, is the rare engineer who also has a background in philosophy—in his case, a Ph.D. Heck’s company works with commercial vehicle fleets to install computer vision and A.I. equipment that studies road conditions and driver behavior. It then sells insights from that data about human driving patterns to autonomous-vehicle companies. Essentially, Nauto’s data helps shape how driverless cars behave on the road—or, put more broadly, how machines governed by artificial intelligence make life-or-death decisions.

This is where the background in philosophy comes in handy. Heck spends his days trying to make roads safe. But the safest decisions don’t always conform to simple rules. To take a random example: Nauto’s data shows that drivers tend to exceed the posted speed limit by about 15 percent—and that it’s safer at times for drivers to go with the flow of that traffic than to follow the speed limit. “The data is unequivocal,” he says. “If you follow the letter of the law, you become a bottleneck. Lots of people pass you, and that’s extremely risky and can increase the fatality rate.”

Much chatter about A.I. focuses on fears that super-smart robots will one day kill us all, or at least take all of our jobs. But the A.I. that already surrounds us must weigh multiple risks and make tough tradeoffs every time it encounters something new. That’s why academics are increasingly grappling with the ethical decisions A.I. will face. But, among the entrepreneurs shaping the future of A.I., it’s often a topic to belittle or avoid. “I’m a unique specimen in the debate,” Heck says. He shouldn’t be. As robot brains increasingly drive decisions in industries as diverse as health care, law enforcement, and banking, whose ethics should they follow?