AI Ethics issues arise in a recent viral news story about a young boy playing tournament chess that got his finger broken by a chess playing robotic arm.
Two things happen next, nearly simultaneously. The boy appears to reach for a chess piece. The robotic arm appears to reach for perhaps the exact same piece. The robotic arm grasps the finger of the child, which we might assume is happening erroneously in that the gripper was presumably supposed to grab hold of the chess piece instead.
It was reported that the boy was apparently not traumatized by the actions. Indeed, it is said that the boy continued the next day in the tournament and was able to finish the chess matches, though maybe not able to record his own chess moves by himself and relied upon volunteers to do so . Relying on the end-user to avoid prodding or prompting the robotic arm into causing harm is a bit of an eye-rolling premise. Take for example the usage by children. Children are children, naturally so. Whether a child will strictly and always abide by some adult-established rules regarding actions when within the grasp of the robotic arm seems a nervy proposition.
This obviously raises the question of what to do if the human opts to nonetheless put their human arm or hand somewhere atop the chessboard, doing so when the robotic arm has already committed to doing the same. In that case, the robotic arm ought to be programmed to go into a mode of either immediate stoppage or some akin risk-reducing positioning.
Going back to the chess-playing robotic arm, you need to consider whether the robotic arm is “safe enough” for the worthiness of its use. A chess tournament does not need to use a robotic arm to move the pieces. A human could do the movement of the pieces, based on an AI chess playing system that merely displayed or spoke aloud the moves to be made.
So, the first thing that should have happened is that the robotic arm and the gripper should not have gripped the child’s finger. Period, end of story. Various sensors could have been included on the robotic arm to detect that the finger was not a chess piece. I am not saying that these are necessarily perfect precautions, but at least it would have been one layer of potential added precaution.
We can assume that no such safety feature was included. If it was included, it either malfunctioned or was not tuned appropriately for this kind of use case. Another possibility is that the AI developers did come up with some considered “extravagant” possibilities that they rated as extreme or unusual cases. These are often referred to as edge cases. The idea is that these are circumstances that rarely will occur. The question then comes up as to whether it is worth the AI development effort to deal with those.
I wanted to mention this because the usual simple mindset is that the AI developers must have been wrong whenever there is an AI system that goes awry. We don’t know that for sure. It could be that what they devised was based on assumptions that seem perfectly sensible, but that the use of the AI system was far beyond what they had been informed.
We also don’t know if there is a chance for a fatality, such as if the robotic arm when swinging to move a piece off the chessboard might strike someone in the head, especially a young child that has sought to impulsively look at the chessboard.Some writers suggested that the AI intentionally harmed the child’s finger.The contention is that the AI was “angry” at the child. The child had perhaps gone out of turn.
Besides employing AI Ethics precepts in general, there is a corresponding question of whether we should have laws to govern various uses of AI. New laws are being bandied around at the federal, state, and local levels that concern the range and nature of how AI should be devised. The effort to draft and enact such laws is a gradual one. AI Ethics serves as a considered stopgap, at the very least, and will almost certainly to some degree be directly incorporated into those new laws.
There might have largely been a spotless record for 14 years and say 11 months, but then a few weeks ago a new software patch was installed . Lo and behold, this patch did add new features. Meanwhile, it could have likewise introduced new problems. Perhaps the gripper code was impacted and no longer abided by various precautionary actions that it had done error-free for years upon years.Unfortunately, this is not necessarily the case in actual practice.
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