Ethics in an automated world

I made a comment that the ‘degree most needed for society in the coming years is an arts degree’ on a panel discussing the future of work. What I meant by the comment is that the automated world is, in my view, going to be a high value place for people who are able to reason and subject decisions to ethical treatment.

We know that an automated world means that any task which has a component of data collection and prediction will be automated. From a cashier to a medical diagnosis, machine learning along with sensors enables far more accurate and bias-free analysis of routine issues. A doctor may have seen 400 or 4,000 cases of a particular medical issue in their careers but a medical diagnostic tool with access to previous medical health records has the knowledge of 4 million cases. There are certainly going to be stops and starts along the way but we, as a society, will pay people less for data collection and analysis.

What we are likely to pay more for is the next part of the decision process – the judgement. Judgement is a separate element  – it is the ‘should we or shouldn’t we’. It is not the ‘90% of cases treated with this method recover fully’ but ‘in this particular case, is it a good idea?’ In my mind, the creation of a machine-based judgement tool is Artificial Intelligence. People may say that we are there, that we can program a bias-free machine to make judgement. Given that we are only now understanding our own biases, I am somewhat skeptical that we are informed enough to build a credible judgement machine.

We may indeed plow on to creating judgement machines without an intermediate step this but I want to place myself in the camp that says ‘use technology that provide us with better insights but leave the final decision to us’. So what we need is people who are qualified ethicists and what we have is a population trained in data collection and analysis. Those people who can build thoughtful and well-reasoned cases using deep analysis completed by machines are going to be the ones that succeed in bettering the state of society and planet.