In today’s world, Artificial Intelligence has become pervasive in our daily lives. AI is with us everywhere and helping us with many consumer and industrial use cases, as shown in the figure below – right from reading our sleep patterns on our smart wearables to the tagging of the content we read on social media to driving our cars to personalizing our online shopping etc.

Intelligent personal assistants like SIRI, CORTONA, and ALEXA have become popular household names, cutting across cultural and generational boundaries. After getting its foothold with consumer apps, AI has penetrated every primary industry, such as retail, healthcare, banking, automotive, insurance, etc. The application of AI technology is rapidly increasing in every vertical sector.

AI is Everywhere

While AI no doubt has been proving to help improve human productivity and accuracy, we have to wonder if it will ever come close to the sophistication of natural intelligence vs. remaining artificial with its many limitations. Can it ever predict insurance claims accurately? Can the AI in a self-driving car be calibrated enough to accurately differentiate between a man/woman/old/disabled? Can we see the social media feed that genuinely interests us? And most of all, is AI capable of incorporating the critical thinking skills of humans? Or, are we just getting busy building something fancier and fancier, which may make us more vulnerable? These are essential questions we must answer first as we move forward with the AI roadmap and broader adoption. As shown in the figure below illustrates the growing adoption.

AI Statistics of Usage Across Industries & Applications

With the rapid advancements in Machine Learning and Deep Learning and the supply of Big Data that is needed to train the respective models to be more accurate, AI may very well close some of the cognitive gaps compared to natural intelligence, but what about the faculties of critical thinking?

Critical thinking manifests itself in ethics, morals, social values, and emotional regulation. These human virtues help us in deciding what is right or wrong. Integrating these virtues into AI is crucial for it to be sensitive, responsible, and intelligent.

What is Ethical Dilemma in AI?

Current efforts focused on building human-like machines (humanoids) face a challenge in fully understanding the gamut of use cases related to virtues that AI algorithms should be trained on. We also have to wonder if we have all the datasets required to build an ethical AI model. As shown in the figure below lists a set of questions that collectively represent the dilemma
we face in this regard.

Addressing these questions can strengthen an AI engine, making it more human-centric than job-centric. But how do we handle these questions?

While there have been many schools of thought around AI ethics, here are a few principles in AI ethics that can help us resolve the dilemma.