The urgency of digital ethics
To fully understand the urgency of digital ethics, we need to go back to the basis of AI. There are many definitions of what AI is or could be, but I think most clarifying is what the “god-father” of our current computers has to say about this topic. Seventy years ago, Alan Turing described in his ground-breaking paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Mind, 1950), what according to him makes machines intelligent. In his paper Turing explains that it is not about definitions but about being pragmatic. He describes his now-called Turing test, in order to test whether machines can think: Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words. The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game.' It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays...