A sociotechnological-system approach to AI ethics

Abstract AI algorithms require human input to achieve technological aims. This fact is often overlooked in discussions of autonomous systems and AI safety, to the detriment of both philosophical discourse and practical progress. One potential remedy is to ground our theorizing more fundamentally in the idea that AI technologies are sociotechnological systems with human and artifactual components. In this article, I pursue this strategy, aiming to shift the focus in AI ethics from artifacts and their intrinsic properties—what I refer to as the robotic conception of AI—to the relationships among elements embedded in AI-involving sociotechnological systems. First, I defend the claim that the sociotechnological-system perspective provides an accurate description of some of our most advanced AI. Second, I argue that the dominance of the robotic conception has steered AI safety research down unproductive paths, while the sociotechnological perspective has the capacity to set us right. Specifically, the robotic conception encourages the development of artificial moral agents—whose creation we should avoid if possible—and distracts researchers with hypothetical trolley cases. In contrast, the sociotechnological approach coheres with actual progress being made on AI safety (e.g., networking, shared user-artifact control, and value alignment) and makes vivid solutions to the safety problem that do not require the creation of humnanlike moral decision-makers.