AI and Ethics
What Are Our Guidelines for the Use of AI?„Artificial intelligence is probably the best or the worst thing that can happen to mankind.“
(Stephen Hawking, physicist)
„The power of artificial intelligence is so incredible that it will change society in profound ways.“
(Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft)
What Are Our Guidelines for the Use of AI?
It’s the year 2024. The hype surrounding LLMs and ChatGPT started a year ago and is now having an initial impact on software development. AI chatbots can not only generate texts, draw photorealistic images, create music or answer questions — they can now also generate functioning programs in a programming language that even work. And through continuous learning, they are getting better and better at what they do. This is a powerful technology and so far there are hardly any regulations or legal guidelines for the use of these tools. So it’s time to start thinking about guard rails for the creation and use of this extremely powerful technology. Because one thing is clear: AI will be integrated into all kinds of products in the future and will therefore have a major impact on all our lives.
To really show the scale that will be upon us with the dawn of the AI age, I would like to quote here from a TED talk by Mustafa Suleyman:
“With that in mind, I offer the following metaphor today to help us grapple with what this moment [the widespread adoption of AI] really is. I think AI is best understood as something like a new digital species. Please don’t take this too literally, but I predict that we will see them as digital companions, new partners in our life journeys. Whether you believe we are on a 10‑, 20- or 30-year journey, I think this is the most accurate and fundamentally honest way to describe what is actually coming.”
And an important insight from him is: “We can only control what we can understand”. So what do we need to do to understand this?