Tackling the Existential Threats from Quantum Computers and AI

Although AI and quantum computing (QC) are fast emerging as key enablers of the future Internet, experts believe they pose an existential threat to humanity. Responding to the frenzied release of ChatGPT/GPT-4, thousands of alarmed tech leaders recently signed an open letter to pause AI research to prepare for the catastrophic threats to humanity from uncontrolled AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Perceived as an “epistemological nightmare”, AGI is believed to be on the anvil with GPT-5. Two computing rules appear responsible for these risks. 1) Mandatory third-party permissions that allow computers to run applications at the expense of introducing vulnerabilities. 2) The Halting Problem of Turing-complete AI programming languages potentially renders AGI unstoppable. The double whammy of these inherent weaknesses remains invincible under the legacy systems. A recent cybersecurity breakthrough shows that banning all permissions reduces the computer attack surface to zero, delivering a new zero vulnerability computing (ZVC) paradigm. Deploying ZVC and blockchain, this paper formulates and supports a hypothesis: “Safe, secure, ethical, controllable AGI/QC is possible by conquering the two unassailable rules of computability.” Pursued by a European consortium, testing/proving the proposed hypothesis will have a groundbreaking impact on the future digital infrastructure when AGI/QC starts powering the 75 billion internet devices by 2025.

OPINION The Need for Ethical AI

Across Asia,countries are putting in place plans to lead the way in the artificial intelligence (AI)-driven era.From China’s Made in China 2025 and Singapore’s Smart Nation plan to Japan’s focus on automating more tasks in a bid offset an aging workforce, it is clear Asia is taking adequate policy steps.

Ethical Principles and Governance Technology Development of AI in China

Ethics and governance are vital to the healthy and sustainable development of artificial intelligence(AI).With the long-term goal of keeping AI beneficial to human society,governments,research organizations,and companies in China have published ethical guidelines and principles for AI,and have launched projects to develop AI governance technologies.This paper presents a survey of these efforts and highlights the preliminary outcomes in China.It also describes the major research challenges in AI governance research and discusses future research directions.

Artificial Intelligence Trends and Ethics: Issues and Alternatives for Investors

Artificial intelligence (AI) based technology, machine learning, and cognitive systems have played a very active role in society’s economic and technological transformation. For industrial value chains and international businesses, it means that a structural change is necessary since these machines can learn and apply new information in making forecasts, processing, and interacting with people. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a science that uses powerful enough techniques, strategies, and mathematical modelling to tackle complex actual problems. Because of its inevitable progress further into the future, there have been considerable safety and ethical concerns. Creating an environment that is AI friendly for the people and vice versa might be a solution for humans and machines to discover a common set of values. In this context, the goal of this study is to investigate the emerging trends of AI (the benefits that it brings to the society), the moral challenges that come from ethical algorithms, learned or pre-set ideals, as well as address the ethical issues and malpractices of AI and AI security. This paper will address the consequences of AI in relation to investors and financial services. The article will examine the challenges and possible alternatives for resolving the potential unethical issues in finance and will propose the necessity of new AI governance mechanisms to protect the efficiency of the capital markets as well as the role of financial authority in the regulation and monitoring of the huge expansion of AI in finance.

The Contestation of Tech Ethics: A Sociotechnical Approach to Technology Ethics in Practice

This article introduces the special issue“Technology Ethics in Action:Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives”.In response to recent controversies about the harms of digital technology,discourses and practices of“tech ethics”have proliferated across the tech industry,academia,civil society,and government.Yet despite the seeming promise of ethics,tech ethics in practice suffers from several significant limitations:tech ethics is vague and toothless,has a myopic focus on individual engineers and technology design,and is subsumed into corporate logics and incentives.These limitations suggest that tech ethics enables corporate“ethics-washing”:embracing the language of ethics to defuse criticism and resist government regulation,without committing to ethical behavior.Given these dynamics,I describe tech ethics as a terrain of contestation where the central debate is not whether ethics is desirable,but what“ethics”entails and who gets to define it.Current approaches to tech ethics are poised to enable technologists and technology companies to label themselves as“ethical”without substantively altering their practices.Thus,those striving for structural improvements in digital technologies must be mindful of the gap between ethics as a mode of normative inquiry and ethics as a practical endeavor.In order to better evaluate the opportunities and limits of tech ethics,I propose a sociotechnical approach that analyzes tech ethics in light of who defines it and what impacts it generates in practice.

Algorithmic Silence:A Call to Decomputerize

Tech critics become technocrats when they overlook the daunting administrative density of a digital-first society.The author implores critics to reject structural dependencies on digital tools rather than naturalize their integration through critique and reform.At stake is the degree to which citizens must defer to unelected experts to navigate such density.Democracy dies in the darkness of sysadmin.The argument and a candidate solution proceed as follows.Since entropy is intrinsic to all physical systems,including digital systems,perfect automation is a fiction.Concealing this fiction,however,are five historical forces usually treated in isolation:ghost work,technical debt,intellectual debt,the labor of algorithmic critique,and various types of participatory labor.The author connects these topics to emphasize the systemic impositions of digital decision tools,which compound entangled genealogies of oppression and temporal attrition.In search of a harmonious balance between the use of“AI”tools and the non-digital decision systems they are meant to supplant,the author draws inspiration from an unexpected source:musical notation.Just as musical notes require silence to be operative,the author positions algorithmic silence-the deliberate exclusion of highly abstract digital decision systems from human decision-making environments-as a strategic corrective to the fiction of total automation.Facial recognition bans and the Right to Disconnect are recent examples of algorithmic silence as an active trend.