Eternal Echoes
To Be or Not To Be: The Ethical Dilemma
With these evolving changes in technology, there comes a whole new unknown realm of ethics. It raises the question of whether a robot can adopt human qualities that would allow it to reach personhood and characteristics we can resonate with. Technically, if these robots are considered humans, they should have the same rights and duties that humans have. However, computers do not have consciousness or free will, therefore they cannot be moral agents. Values, assumptions, and judgments are built into the AI tools, reflecting the beliefs of the creators. When immersed in these applications, users become desensitized to immoral behaviors. This creates potential harms around consent and how this tool will be used.
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"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."
-Immanuel Kant
"Whoever is running the simulation wants the people to behave a certain way in a situation. They are going to be imposing all sorts of external judgments about what should be done. These little bits of code, there's no way for them to be free. It turns into whatever the master of the simulation wants them to be."
-Brian Green, PHd, Director of Technology Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University
