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The Human Side of Artificial Intelligence Matthew A. Butkus1

© Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract Artificial moral agents raise complex ethical questions both in terms of the potential decisions they may make as well as the inputs that create their cognitive architecture. There are multiple differences between human and artificial cognition which create potential barriers for artificial moral agency, at least as understood anthropocentrically and it is unclear that artificial moral agents should emulate human cognition and decision-making. It is conceptually possible for artificial moral agency to emerge that reflects alternative ethical methodologies without creating ontological challenges or existential crises for human moral agents. Keywords  Artificial intelligence · Neural modeling · Popular culture · Ontology · Moral agency · Ethics

Introduction I want to thank Drs. Farisco, Evers, and Salles for their compelling cautionary statement regarding the ethical evaluation of artificial intelligence. The themes in their work merit additional exploration with both critical and expansive eyes and I will follow their outline regarding essential criteria for artificial intelligence as well as both theoretical and practical issues in intelligence and ethics. Their work invites comparison to findings in both cognitive psychology and neuroscience (and popular culture)—the questions raised about deliberation and moral agency draw immediate parallels to our own processing as the model with which we have the most direct experience. Ultimately, there are ontological questions as to whether we ought to feel challenged by the possibility of artificial moral agents and whether we ought to

Commentary for “Towards establishing criteria for the ethical analysis of artificial intelligence.” by Michele Farisco et al. * Matthew A. Butkus [email protected] 1



Department of Social Sciences, McNeese State University, Lake Charles, LA, USA

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welcome a potentially different model of ethical reasoning, considering the cognitive architecture for our own moral reasoning can be (charitably) described as haphazard.

Essential Features of AI In their introduction, Farisco, Evers, and Salles introduce the controversy in defining artificial intelligence, suggesting the minimal criteria of “perception of the environment through sensors; reasoning/decision-making on data perceived; and actuation through executors.” Self-learning machines epitomize these criteria as the apparent endpoint of a continuum of less “intelligent” machines. Artificial intelligence takes many forms from programmed algorithms to autonomous vehicles and robots. There is immediate appeal to the criteria and obvious parallels to our own cognitive experience of the world around us. Throughout our history, we have fashioned ourselves to be reasonable and mostly rational beings, perceiving the world through our own phenomenological filters, weighing and evaluating what we perceive, drawing inferences and other logical relationships, an