AI Ethics Grapples With Societal AI Wish Fulfillment, Including The Dreamy Case Of Those Idolized AI-Based Self-Driving Cars

Do you sometimes find yourself wishing upon a star?

I’m sure you do. We all do.

Such an act of wishing does not seem to matter who you are. There’s always a distant chance of your dreams coming true whether they are near or are afar.

This has got to be one of the most longstanding poetic sing-song bents of humankind (expressed in many ways throughout time and history). You can pretty much assert that wish-fulfillment is a bedrock of the human spirit. We’ve wished before, we wish today, and by all accounts, we’ll continue to be wishing in the future.

As you’ll see in a moment, my focus for this discourse is going to be centered on AI wish-fulfillment.

This notion of AI wish-fulfillment turns out to be a quite sobering and contemplative matter, particularly by those that are versed in the realm of AI Ethics (also sometimes referred to as Ethical AI). The gist is that we as a society might be blissfully wishing for AI in a somewhat altruistic fashion, boding lamentably for a heavy falling out further down the road. You might say that the word “blissfully” should be construed as recklessly, mindlessly, and perilously. For those of you generally interested in the AI Ethics arena, you might take a look at my coverage of Ethical AI aspects, such as see the link here and the link here, just to name a few.

Before we dive into the details of AI wish-fulfillment, it might be handy to do a wee bit more ruminating about the intrinsic nature of wishes and their impact on human behavior. This will suitably set the stage and get you primed for the beefy AI-specific part of this elucidation.

Open your mind to the fanciful world of wishes.

Imagine that you are dearly embracing a desirous wish that you’ll attain an eagerly sought promotion at work. Meanwhile, suppose you are also clutching a heartfelt wish toward winning the mega-millions multi-state lottery.

Those are two quite illuminating sets of wishes.

First, in terms of garnering a promotion at work, I would earnestly suggest that your personal actions can demonstrably aid in bringing that wish to fruition. You might work night and day to showcase how hard a worker you are. You might gingerly nudge your supervisor or manager to remind them of a promotion that seems due or overdue. There are lots of everyday actions that you could take to try and steer that wish into reality.

Let’s call that a practical kind of a wish and one that has a substantive probability of coming true. To clarify, there isn’t any guarantee that this noteworthy wish is going to be ultimately achieved. Perhaps the company suddenly lays off a slew of employees and you are included in the bunch. Maybe the powers that be decide summarily you aren’t suitable for a promotion. One never knows what might occur, though the point still is that your wish seems imminently practical and can be somewhat shaped by your wits and actions.

Consider next the wish to win the mega-millions multi-state lottery. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news but the odds of winning one of those massive pots are extraordinarily slim. Sorry if that seems gloomy. On top of the sour odds, there is really not much of any kind of personal effort or action that you can do to increase your chances of getting the winning ticket. You simply buy a lottery ticket and wait until the numbers are called.

Unless you can somehow hack your way into the lottery computers, you are stuck like the rest of us as being faced with incredibly high odds of not catching the enormous cache of dough. As an aside, a smarmy person would say that you could legally purchase thousands or millions of tickets to try and win the lottery, which though generally true, would seem rather unorthodox and not a viable strategy for anyone other than a handful of outrageously wealthy players. Let’s put these outlier considerations aside.

The lottery administrators love to entice you by pointing out that if you don’t buy a ticket you can’t participate, so you have a zero chance of winning if you don’t at least get into the game. Here are some of the most popular taglines by various lotteries:

• Dare to Dream
• Make the Impossible a Reality
• Give Yourself the Gift of a Dream
• Dreams for Sale
• Dream of the Impossible Dream
• Etc.

All told, and please prepare yourself to be potentially triggered, the wish to win the big lotteries is regrettably an impractical wish on the face of things. On the other hand, as earlier indicated, the wish to garner a promotion is reasonably plausible, usually, and ergo ranks in the category of practical wishes.

We should not though entirely discount wishes simply as a result of their practical or seemingly impractical nature.

It could be that wishing to win the lottery makes you happy. For a buck or whatever the lottery ticket costs, perhaps this gives you immense happiness for the days or weeks until the lottery numbers are announced. That’s a snazzy deal. Low investment with a high return on happiness. You could argue that this is what the lottery organizers are betting on, namely that there will be a potential spillover from the impractical chances of winning into a “practical” semi-tangible result of your being momentarily happy (albeit lasting until you see the chosen numbers).

The essence is that wishes and the pangs of wish fulfillment can bring forth other consequential results beyond the target of the wish per se. You might say that sometimes a wish can have positive unintended consequences, while at other times a wish can have adverse unintended consequences. Wishes can drive us to do things that we might otherwise not have opted to do, both good and bad.

One other additional facet about wishes is that they can be of a personal or individualist caliber, or they can be of a group or collective quality. Your wish to get that promotion at work is presumably a personal or individualistic one. Others might have a similar wish at their jobs, though this is not especially connected to your particular wish.

The wish to win the lottery would certainly seem a widespread or collective wish. You can describe this as a societal-oriented wish based on how large-scale a wish it seems to be. This kind of wish is widely shared, aiding in shaping behavior across a vast spectrum of people and places in a very directly connectable way.

Now that we’ve got some handy wish-fulfillment axioms on the table, we can turn our attention to the intriguing matter of AI wish-fulfillment.

Are you ready?

Here’s the deal.

AI ethicists point out that humankind at times has a societal wish-fulfillment regarding the advent of Artificial Intelligence (the venerated AI). Perhaps this is stoked by all those sci-fi movies and TV shows that we see. You could go back further in time and look at older books and dusty writings that have postulated a possibility of machines exhibiting human intelligence. This strident embodiment of wishes about AI is not a sudden revelation.

What makes it especially notable now is that we appear to be in a posture to devise and experience AI in a manner that heretofore was unable to construct or field. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

One version of those AI wishes consists of a better world due to the emergence and use of AI. We might be able to use AI to solve world hunger and overcome other scourges that we all are collectively globally confronting. AI is the silver bullet if you will. A wonderful world will be the byproduct of our finally getting AI underway in a thankfully substantive sense.

Another version of those AI wishes is not quite so cheerful. If you were upset that I already mentioned that winning the lottery is lousy odds, you aren’t going to like my noting that AI could be a real downer. Some highly vocal pundits have exhorted that AI is an existential risk. You know what they are talking about, such as that AI will be smarter than us (the so-called superintelligence) and will choose to kill us off. That hurts.

I’d ask that you push those dour AI wishes into the recesses of your mind for the purposes of this discussion, though do keep them at the ready. We don’t want to let them get lost someplace. To make the dialogue here a bit cleaner, it will be easiest to focus on the happy face side of AI wishes. I assure you that we could readily expound upon the sad face (or the freaked-out face) version too (I’ll likely cover this in a future column, don’t you worry).

Assume that there is a wish about AI that consists of the upbeat side of things. Via AI, we are going to end up with a type of utopia. Again, as I just said, do not allow thoughts of a dystopia to creep into your mind for this particular chat. The world is going to be grandly happy with AI. Society will wonder how we ever got along without AI, to begin with.

Suppose that we entertain this happiness-inducing version of AI wish-fulfillment.

You might ask, can’t we have our dreams?

As Cinderella told us, have faith in your dreams and someday that rainbow will come smiling on through and your wish will indubitably come true (that’s a paraphrasing of the sage wisdom).

The problem with this AI wish-fulfillment is that when extended across and throughout society, it can engender questionable actions and endeavors associated with blindly pushing forward on AI that we might not really have wanted, or wanted in a different way or at a different time.

That might seem overly abstract, so let’s recount what AI ethicists tend to highlight about the downbeats of the upbeat version of the AI wish-fulfillment phenomenon:

• We might ignore or undercut the real risks associated with AI
• We could overinflate the benefits of AI beyond what they really are
• We might proceed without caution on employing AI
• We could dangerously accept bogus exaggerations about AI
• We might reward fast-tracking of AI that leads to calamity
• We could focus on AI successes and ignore instructive AI failures
• We might allow groupthink to take us down the AI perils path
• And so on

In short, a society under the guise of AI wish-fulfillment could inadvertently be shooting our own collective foot (or is it those feet?). Whatsoever is untoward about AI will be swept under the rug. The collective wisdom of the crowd will be to tout the AI For Good and disregard the AI For Bad. Those that try to gain airtime to bring up AI For Bad are going to find no breathable space to do so.

It’s going to be good times for AI and no turning back or even glancing over our fatigued shoulders.

In a recent research study published in the AI And Ethics Journal entitled “Socio-Cognitive Biases In Folk AI Ethics And Risk Discourse,” the researchers ably ask how far this might go, namely that “from a strict utility maximization perspective, pursuing the scenario with infinite expected utility is the rational choice regardless of its probability. Similarly, any action which promotes the development of utopian AI would appear rational regardless of the probability of achieving the desired outcome, whatever the sacrifices” (article co-authored by Michael Laakasuo, Volo Herzon, Silva Perander, Marianna Drosinou, Jukka Sundvall, Jussi Palomaki, and Aku Visala).

Bottom-line, we might forsake all sorts of other important globe-saving tasks as we zealously pursue this AI wish-fulfillment. Thus, there is a double-whammy, whereby we perhaps craft and release AI that is riddled with AI For Bad, and meanwhile we might have been expending that energy and resources toward something else with a greater and more beneficial worldwide payoff. Make that a multi-whammy instead of merely a double-whammy.

Wishes can drive us to do some remarkably wild and crazy things.

Speaking of driving (yes, I snuck that in there), this allows me to shift into the topic of AI-based true self-driving cars, which will fit nicely into the AI wish-fulfillment theme.

You see, in my capacity as an expert on AI including the ethical and legal ramifications, I am frequently asked to identify realistic examples that showcase AI Ethics dilemmas so that the somewhat theoretical nature of the topic can be more readily grasped. One of the most evocative areas that vividly presents this ethical AI quandary is the advent of AI-based true self-driving cars. This will serve as a handy use case or exemplar for ample discussion on the topic.

Here’s then a noteworthy question that is worth contemplating: Does the advent of AI-based true self-driving cars contain AI wish-fulfillment considerations, and if so, should we be worried about it?

Allow me a moment to unpack the question.

First, note that there isn’t a human driver involved in a true self-driving car. Keep in mind that true self-driving cars are driven via an AI driving system. There isn’t a need for a human driver at the wheel, nor is there a provision for a human to drive the vehicle. For my extensive and ongoing coverage of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and especially self-driving cars, see the link here.

I’d like to further clarify what is meant when I refer to true self-driving cars.

Understanding The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars

As a clarification, true self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.

These driverless vehicles are considered Level 4 and Level 5 (see my explanation at this link here), while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).

There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.

Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some contend, see my coverage at this link here).

Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars won’t be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so there’s not much new per se to cover about them on this topic (though, as you’ll see in a moment, the points next made are generally applicable).

For semi-autonomous cars, it is important that the public needs to be forewarned about a disturbing aspect that’s been arising lately, namely that despite those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.

You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.

Self-Driving Cars And Those Wishes Coming True

For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there won’t be a human driver involved in the driving task.

All occupants will be passengers.

The AI is doing the driving.

One aspect to immediately discuss entails the fact that the AI involved in today’s AI driving systems is not sentient. In other words, the AI is altogether a collective of computer-based programming and algorithms, and most assuredly not able to reason in the same manner that humans can.

Why is this added emphasis about the AI not being sentient?

Because I want to underscore that when discussing the role of the AI driving system, I am not ascribing human qualities to the AI. Please be aware that there is an ongoing and dangerous tendency these days to anthropomorphize AI. In essence, people are assigning human-like sentience to today’s AI, despite the undeniable and inarguable fact that no such AI exists as yet.

With that clarification, you can envision that the AI driving system won’t natively somehow “know” about the facets of driving. Driving and all that it entails will need to be programmed as part of the hardware and software of the self-driving car.

Let’s dive into the myriad of aspects that come to play on this topic.

First, it is important to realize that not all AI self-driving cars are the same. Each automaker and self-driving tech firm is taking its approach to devising self-driving cars. As such, it is difficult to make sweeping statements about what AI driving systems will do or not do.

Furthermore, whenever stating that an AI driving system doesn’t do some particular thing, this can, later on, be overtaken by developers that in fact program the computer to do that very thing. Step by step, AI driving systems are being gradually improved and extended. An existing limitation today might no longer exist in a future iteration or version of the system.

I trust that provides a sufficient litany of caveats to underlie what I am about to relate.

We are primed now to do a deep dive into self-driving cars and whether AI wish-fulfillment might be hanging around and altering our beliefs and actions regarding the pursuit of driverless cars.

To comport with space constraints, I will provide two prime examples of how some believe that AI wish-fulfillment is indeed alive and well within and around the emergence of AI self-driving cars. They decry these outsized, outstretched, and altogether ominous AI wishes. I’m only going to cover just two of those denounced qualms, so if you want to read a dozen or so of them, see my related coverage at this link here.

The first example is one that I have already let the cat out of the bag by having mentioned just a moment ago, namely that we as a society are allowing tryouts of self-driving cars on our public roadways. Not everyone agrees that this is a wise thing to do.

A self-driving car coming along on your local street or highway might make a wrong move. The AI driving system is more so of an experimental nature than it is something fully vetted. Those outspoken pundits warn that we are allowing ourselves to be guinea pigs. Plus, they are usually quick to emphasize those self-driving cars should be first exhaustively and utterly tested via computer-based simulations and by use in specially prepared closed tracks (I’ve covered these approaches in my column, many times, see the link here), and only after some form of governmental certification or verification has been undertaken should those autonomous vehicles be on our public roadways.

We have jumped the gun, they exclaim.

Why did we do so?

One answer is that we are mentally under the fog of AI wish-fulfillment.

We want with all our heart to have AI-based true self-driving cars that will seemingly reduce the number of annual injuries and fatalities due to car crashes (in the United States alone there are about 40,000 annual fatalities from car crashes and around 2.5 million injuries, see the stats here). We hope too that self-driving cars will enable widespread mobility-as-a-service. Those in society today who lack a car or are unable to afford a car will presumably have access to low-cost always-available robo-taxis.

The list of anticipated benefits arising from AI-based self-driving cars is lengthy and breathtaking. You would seem to have your head in the sand to not want to have self-driving cars. And want them now, not waiting until some later date. Each day that passes is another day of car crashes, injuries, fatalities, and inequities related to mobility.

Wait for a second, don’t forget about the downsides of the upbeats of AI wish-fulfillment, some will vehemently yell at the top of their lungs. Let’s reexamine the list and this time emphasize that rather than just any plain-old any kind of AI, we are now specifically discussing AI self-driving cars:

• We might ignore or undercut the real risks associated with AI self-driving cars
• We could overinflate the benefits of AI self-driving cars beyond what they really are
• We might proceed without caution on deploying AI self-driving cars
• We could dangerously accept bogus exaggerations about AI self-driving cars
• We might reward fast-tracking of AI self-driving cars that leads to calamity
• We could focus on AI self-driving car successes and ignore instructive AI self-driving car failures
• We might allow groupthink to take us down the AI self-driving cars perils path
• And so on

Yikes, is that what we are in the midst of doing?

While you are mulling over that example, let’s add more fuel to the fire.

One aspect that very few are discussing is the incredibly massive privacy intrusion that AI self-driving cars are going to bring to our doorsteps, our neighborhoods, and the entirety of our lives. I have commented on this repeatedly, even anointing it as the veritable and proverbial “roving eye” that will soon be amongst us (see the link here).

Allow me a moment to explain.

A self-driving car is driving down your street. It is on its way to picking up someone in your community. No big deal. The self-driving car is driving peacefully, legally, and abiding by all traffic laws. You barely even notice it as it passes your cherished home.

I realize that for those that are not yet familiar with seeing self-driving cars on the roads, you might find it hard to believe that you wouldn’t stare, point, and gawk at a self-driving car that perchance went down your street. Well, I assure you, when you live in an area that has them aplenty, such as in Silicon Valley, it is the old line that when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Most people in the areas of the tryouts have already gotten used to seeing self-driving cars. Those autonomous vehicles are rampant. You encounter them frequently. More than you might think.

Nowadays, locals would tend to say that rather than being a standout as something exciting and futuristic, the self-driving cars roaming here and there is a mild nuisance due to driving extremely legally, such as making full stops at Stop signs and not willing to put the pedal to the floor. When you spot a self-driving car ahead of you, the reaction is to consider how to get around the thing or go a different way to avoid it. You might equate this to the annoyance you have when encountering a newbie teenage driver at the wheel (though, as clarification, the AI of today is not at all of a human proficiency).

Let’s get back to the roving eye.

The self-driving car that went down your street was packed with various sensors, including possibly video cameras, radar, LIDAR, ultrasonic devices, thermal imagining units, and the like. You’ve undoubtedly seen pictures of self-driving cars that appear to have a rack on the rooftop and all kinds of gadgets jutting out from the exterior of the autonomous vehicle.

Those sensors are collecting data about the driving scene. The AI driving system computationally analyzes the data to try and figure out what kinds of driving actions are suitable. Where is the roadway headed? Are there cars parked on the street? Is a dog about to dart into the path of the self-driving car? These are all crucial to the driving actions and the AI adjusting the driving controls accordingly.

You might not have thought about something else that these sensors are doing. In the midst of detecting the roadway, they are also collecting data about anything else nearby. For example, suppose you are standing in front of your house and mowing the lawn. The self-driving car goes past your house. You don’t think anything of it.

The next day, you receive a mailer that tells you that new lawnmowers are on sale. Why did you get this mailer? Because the video and other sensory data of the driving scene and surroundings went up into the cloud. The fleet operator or the maker of the self-driving car can examine that data. They might have a deal with other companies about how to mine the data. In this case, the fact that you were spotted mowing the lawn is handy. A company that makes or sells lawnmowers would pay to know that you have a lawnmower and that you use it. The data could be AI inspected to figure out which model you have and how old it is. All of this could be used to target you for a new lawnmower.

Realize too that the data would have your home address. This data could be paired with other demographic data and other databases to try and craft a deep profile about you. There are lots of other ways that this data could be utilized, many of them alarmingly nefarious. If you want to stay awake at night worrying about this, go ahead and see my analyses at this link here.

Why in the heck would we let this self-driving car roving eye come into existence?

The answer by some is that we are under the happy-flavored aura of the AI wish-fulfillment phenomena.

Conclusion

Are we as a society taking too many chances about letting AI self-driving cars proceed apace?

Has the dreaminess of the AI wish-fulfillment overtaken our practical sensibilities?

These are important questions. AI ethicists are pounding away at trying to bring these crucial points to the collective consciousness of society. It is hard to poke through widespread communal dreams. An all-too-common response is that such “naysayers” are viewed as a spoilsport or disruptively a doom-and-gloom grouch.

One last remark for now.

Walt Disney was famously known for the sign that he placed above the entrance to Disneyland that said these immortal words: “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.” I ask you, with regard to today’s AI self-driving cars, are we in the realm of down-to-earth pragmatics or are we slipping into a kind of fantasyland. The same question ought to be asked about all manner of AI that we are devising.

We are assuredly in for a dramatic journey (akin to Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride), and as Walt was known for notably declaring, apparently we need to dream, believe, dare, do.