The Moral Dimension of AI-Assisted Decision-Making: Some Practical Perspectives from the Front Lines

This essay takes an engineering approach to ensuring that the deployment of artificial intelligence does not confound ethical principles, even in sensitive applications like national security. There are design techniques in all three parts of the AI architecture-algorithms, data sets, and applications-that can be used to incorporate important moral considerations. The newness and complexity of AI cannot therefore serve as an excuse for immoral outcomes of deployment by companies or governments.