Broken Head: Artificial Intelligence and Ethics

Dong-Shin Yi

Professor, Seoul National University

 The fast approaching age of artificial intelligence requires humans to decide whether this new being will be a highly advanced tool subject to human control and will, or an interdependent companion that humans must learn to coexist with. Either decision should be accompanied by an appropriate set of ethical rules. Believing in the well-formed mind of artificial intelligence, and its full integration with human life, leaves us no room to choose the latter. This paper discusses the ethical possibilities of artificial intelligence by suggesting a thought experiment wherein artificial intelligence is broken, and asking how we should deal with this broken artificial being. Implied in the experiment are two preconditions. The first is that artificial intelligence must be fully mature in order to be on an ethically equal footing as humans. The second is that the term “broken” should be considered free of an anthro- pocentric understanding. By using Isaac Asimov’s stories as an example, the paper incorporates the recent post-humanist discussions of speculative ethics and new materialisms to explain the two preconditions and the irimplications further, and underscores the importance of imagining virtually infinite possibilities that artificial intelligence, broken or not, possesses, independently of human existence. These possibilities mean a new world whose potential to flourish hangs on our decision on artificial intelligence. This paper argues that we consider ethical possibilities of artificial intelligence in such a world-forming scale and with huge responsibilities appropriate to that scale.

Key words： artificial intelligence, speculative ethics, new materialisms, posthumanism, Isaac Asimov