Self-driving cars are already inspiring discussion of AI ethics in mainstream media.
Driving is something that most people in the developed world feel familiar with — even if they don't themselves drive a car or truck, they interact with people who do. They are aware of the consequences of collisions, traffic jams, road rage, trucker or cabdriver strikes, and other failures of cooperation on the road. The kinds of moral judgments involved in driving are familiar to most people — in a way that (say) operating a factory or manipulating a stock market are not.
I don't mean to imply that most people make good moral judgments about driving — or that they will reach conclusions about self-driving cars that an AI-aware consequentialist would agree with. But they will feel like having opinions on the issue, rather than writing it off as something that programmers or lawyers should figure out. And some of those people will actually become more aware of the issue, who otherwise (i.e. in the absence of self-driving cars) would not.
So yeah, people will become more and more aware of AI ethics. It's already happening.
Self-driving cars will also inevitably catalyze discussion of the economic morality of AI deployment. Or rather, self-driving trucks will, as they put millions of truck drivers out of work over the course of five to ten years — long-distance truckers first, followed by delivery drivers. As soon as the ability to retrofit an existing truck with self-driving is available, it would be economic idiocy for any given trucking firm to not adopt it as soon as possible. Robots don't sleep or take breaks.
So, who benefits? The owners of the trucking firm and the folks who make the robots. And, of course, everyone whose goods are now being shipped twice as fast because robots don't sleep or take breaks. (The AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, but you have a job that it can do better than you can.)
As this level of AI — not AGI, but application-specific AI — replaces more and more skilled labor, faster and faster, it will become increasingly impractical for the displaced workers to retrain into the fewer and fewer remaining jobs.
This is also a moral problem of AI ...
Whether we should do otherwise-obviously-suboptimal things solely because it'd result in more jobs is a question that long predates self-driving cars...
Cross-posted from my blog.
Yudkowsky writes:
My own projection goes more like this:
At least one clear difference between my projection and Yudkowsky's is that I expect AI-expert performance on the problem to improve substantially as a greater fraction of elite AI scientists begin to think about the issue in Near mode rather than Far mode.
As a friend of mine suggested recently, current elite awareness of the AGI safety challenge is roughly where elite awareness of the global warming challenge was in the early 80s. Except, I expect elite acknowledgement of the AGI safety challenge to spread more slowly than it did for global warming or nuclear security, because AGI is tougher to forecast in general, and involves trickier philosophical nuances. (Nobody was ever tempted to say, "But as the nuclear chain reaction grows in power, it will necessarily become more moral!")
Still, there is a worryingly non-negligible chance that AGI explodes "out of nowhere." Sometimes important theorems are proved suddenly after decades of failed attempts by other mathematicians, and sometimes a computational procedure is sped up by 20 orders of magnitude with a single breakthrough.