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The Moral And Ethical Issues Of Artificial Intelligence

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fertilization, surrogate motherhood, and human cloning once were considered immoral, but since moral codes changed due to cultural settings, they became interweaved into the culture’s fabric and became acceptable. The key to understanding the moral and ethical issues raised by artificial intelligence are the four levels on which intelligent artifacts raise ethical and moral problems. The first level concerns the ethical uses of computers and how humans respond to a world that is constantly being transformed by artificial intelligence machines. With the rapid growth of the internet, it sets the values of people’s security and privacy to a higher standard. New inventions such as telepresence and telecommuting challenge how humans deal with…show more content…
In the book Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man, author Margaret Boden explains how humans are grounded to the material world. When this book was published, many people took offense and considered the explanation dehumanizing. But the bottom line is that human nature spawns deviant behavior codes. Examples of these deviant behavior codes would be Social Darwinism, which justified killing off any person who could not be independent in society. The Nazis took this idea to mean that anyone who was Jewish or had mental defects should be terminated. Today, with artificial intelligence machines, genetic engineering can form human organs or even create babies. However, genetic engineering could be easily abused and present a more subtle moral and ethical dilemma than it did in the past. At the third level, ethical and moral issues are about the new obligations and duties that humans have toward artificial intelligent machines. One of the many unknown questions is if artificial intelligence will be able to experience pain and suffering like humans. This would make humans obliged to avoid doing actions that would result in pain towards artificial intelligence machines. An example would be the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). This organization says that animals experience pain and suffering as much as humans do, and deserve to be treated with the same moral code that humans apply to each other. The answer to treating other living
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