Vivenne Ming swept into the room, frazzled. One of America’s leading thinkers on artificial intelligence (AI) had spent the previous night in an airport, where she alleged she was sexually assaulted. “On discovery — because he was arrested — he was studying religion at Princeton,” she said. “So it turns out the things we study may not, in fact, define whether we do good in this world.”
It was a harrowing lesson that Ming believes applies perfectly to her field, which is suddenly flowering with “AI ethics” committees, confabs and counsels, all set up to reckon with the coming of hyper-intelligent machines that threaten to put us out of work and turn society on its head. Google set up an AI ethics board last March,