This page will examine how ethical questions are emerging and are being discussed in other areas of emerging technology, with an emphasis on looking at issues which might be helpful for addressing ethical questions concerning codes of ethics for AI. This page is work in progress. Please keep checking back.

Meanwhile …

There are many areas where rapidly advancing technology is shaping questions in ethics. Often, these are not new questions per se, but questions which become more urgent, or which emerge from the shadows, having been present all along. Often, questions are asked in one area, which are also directly relevant to other areas. Many of these questions relate not so much to what has traditionally come to be seen as the domain of ‘ethics’, but to the social (and cultural and economic) implications of technology. These questions are however generally intimately bound up with questions in ethics. And as AI has effects on how we think of ourselves as humans, how we think of ourselves as agents, how we envisage our future, individually and collectively, how we interact with each other on an individual and a societal level, there will be potentially profound questions that arise at the intersection of ethics and society from the development of technology, in AI as elsewhere.

These are just some of the questions that need to be asked in considering how to develop codes of ethics in rapidly developing technologies.

How can ethical regulation keep up where technologies are developing so fast?

How can the public be kept informed and involved in debates about rapidly emerging technologies?

Slippery slopes and boiling frogs … accepting technologies – or having them thrust upon us?

Technological advances and fairness – does new technology deepen existing social and economic divides?

We would like to thank the Future of Life Institute for their generous sponsorship of our programme of research.