Learn Business Ethics And AI Ethics And Responsible AI Use

1. AI Ethics Welcome And Introduction: Welcome to this course on business ethics and specifically AI use at work and responsible AI use. My name is Alex Kandinik and I'll be your instructor. In this video, I'll briefly tell you what to expect from the course, a little bit about myself, and we'll start right away. Well, I've been studying philosophy since university and after university, I'm passionate about ethics and philosophy, and I've been doing AI since the first week. It became publicly available with ChaGPTs Big launch. So in this course, I'm very excited to bridge and bring you the two areas of interest, AI and philosophy, specifically ethics. So what we're going to do in this course is we're first going to go over major theories in ethics so that you can be equipped and empowered to reason over any dilemma or ethical challenge that you're faced with no matter whether it's an issue we're going to discuss in this course or something you're going to face in the future. Where you're going to have to think independently. So by the end of this course, you will be able to think strongly in a sophisticated manner and independently and evaluate ethical AI use issues professionally and in a sophisticated manner. Then we're going to go over how to actually apply that to AI scenarios at work, whether it becomes too bias, NAI, data, privacy, or the many other concerns of AI use ethically. And then we're going to talk about AI governance and structures within companies for how to enable and implement ethical AI use at your workplace. The course is designed to be relatively short and practical, so you can take the course in under one day and begin applying it in your workplace. So welcome. Let's begin. 2. Difference Between Morals And Ethics: Before we can start thinking about the ethics of business, we have to understand what is ethics, and in the same breath as what is ethics, there's another question, what are morals. So before we can reason about business, ethics, technology, ethics, we have to understand a little bit about ethics. And in this video, let me explain to you the difference between ethics and morals because I know that in everyday life, we use these terms almost interchangeably, but they are not the same and if we're going to be rigorously looking at the differences and looking at what is the true conclusion for difficult questions, we have to apply some philosophical rigor and have strict distinctions. So first, let's examine what are morals? Morals are personal beliefs about what is right or wrong. They may come from your cultural upbringing, religious values, or they may be rooted in your own personal experience because as you go through life, you start learning what works and what doesn't and what tends to be good and bad. Simple example of a moral may be that I believe that lying is wrong. This is a personal belief, and it might be based on your personal values. Now, opposed to that, are ethics. Ethics are more general. They are shared principles and standards for behavior within a group or profession. In professions, there are medical ethics, like you shouldn't harm your patients, and there are many different applied ethics in different professions that have been developed over time. Generally, ethics can be societal rules and norms or philosophical frameworks for decision making, some of which we'll go over, or ethics can be professional codes. Like I mentioned, medical ethics or legal ethics, different industries have their own ethics. And because in this video, we wanted to gain a great understanding of the difference between morals and ethics, let's go over it as a summary. So the key difference morals are your internal compass. That's what you believe is right. But ethics are external standards. They are what your society or profession say is right. Now, there's also a question, under societal rules and norms, are the laws of that society applied? So laws overlap with ethics, but are not always the same thing because there may be accepted ethics in a society but the legal writing and the legal framework may actually have different conclusions because different sets of people create the laws, but there is a strong overlap. And there's also difference, obviously, in enforcement. Laws are enforced by the government, whereas ethics aren't enforced by social pressure and reputation or professional consequences. So the conclusion is, yes, ethics overlap with laws, but it is not the same thing, so don't conflate it. So again, morals are your personal beliefs, ethics are the beliefs of a society, and laws overlap with ethics, but they are not the same thing. 3. Conventional Vs Objective Morality: Before we get into different theories in ethics, there is a very important concept that I want you to think about, and that is objective versus conventional morality. So as we'll go through the different theories in ethics, I want to invite you to always think about this question and understand the different ethical theories in light of this question of, is there true objective morality, like some one objective morality that's true for everybody, maybe passed on by God, or if you don't believe in God, maybe that just exists for all of us, that we all understand. Or is there conventional morality, which is a morality that we agree with each other within a society or culture. Like in some cultures in the world, maybe killing is just fine, but in our culture, killing is not fine at all. And that's the difference that conventional morality is just more centralized to a culture or society. And as we're looking at this, you might be confused about the term morality, because morality as we looked at it is individual. So let me explain that a little bit because in a true philosophical sense, there's a little bit of overlap with the term ethics. When philosophers debate objective versus conventional morality, they're asking whether moral truths exist independent of what anyone thinks. They use the term morality broadly to cover what's both morals and ethics. So when you see these technical terms, objective morality, conventional morality, you can also think of them as objective ethics or conventional ethics, at least for the purpose of understanding and examining what the philosophical theories have to say. But the really important question to ask is, are there really true answers to our ethical questions? Or are there just manufactured societal answers that are attempts to create some kind of ethics, but aren't the ultimate ethics? That's the real question we're after. So when we examine the philosophical theories, that's the question that should be in your mind is, is this the ultimate truth or is this going to apply narrowly? And just as a hint, what you'll see is a bunch of incredible theories on ethics. When put to a test, they're going to be like spaghetti. They're never going to get you to one true answer, but they are going to give you incredibly strong perspectives and lines of thinking with which you'll be able to tackle and examine many of the ethical issues that are going to come up in your business or related to your specific industry. That's why it's so important to learn these incredible ethical theories so that we can equip ourselves with the best possible ability to reason well. So with that in mind, let's get into the different theories in ethics. 4. MajorTheoriesInEthics: So now let's examine the major different theories in ethics. And what we're going to go over is a very, very, very condensed version of a first year university ethics class. But instead of a full semester, we'll hopefully do it in five or 10 minutes. So, of course, I'll have to leave out some things, but this isn't strictly an ethics class. We just need the basic ethics frameworks. So commonly, the first ethical theory that's taught is by Jeremy Bentham. He was born in 17 48, and his ethical theory is utilitarianism and utilitarianism states that we are morally required to do whatever produces the greatest pleasure minus pain. So you're basically calculating, if you feed 100 people, it's better than if you could feed 99 people. So feeding 100 people is ethically and morally better. And very importantly, this theory focuses on the results and consequences of your actions, not your intention. So immediately there are some problems because sometimes you have unintended consequences, that's just a minor problem. But there's a lot of issues in this line of thinking. It's a very popular line of thinking. It's very easy to understand this line of thinking. Like, yeah, whatever produces the greatest pleasure and moves us from as much pain as possible, that really makes sense. But let me highlight the problems with utilitarianism. The first issue is that we as human beings, don't actually seek pleasure as the highest good. Pure pleasure is just hiddenism. It's actually a negative thing, and pain aren't the thing that we are mostly trying to get away from. There are other more important things like freedom, friendships, fulfillment, doing different things in our lives and just doing good for others. Yes, you can kind of see how these are also a form of pleasure, but not directly pleasure in terms of getting pure pleasure, like being on a beach or enjoying some luxury. That's a crack in this philosophy, but also it's just hard to quantify pleasure. There is no such math for pleasure quantification. Like if 100 people lose their sight versus one person dying, which one is better or worse? You can spend a lifetime debating this and still not get to the answer. If I buy you as a gift, two economy cars versus a Mercedes, how do you quantify and count the pleasure? You can't though you have to calculate very precisely, you actually can't no such math. But there's yet another problem with this philosophy, and that is, imagine this scenario. Let's say there's a public opinion and somebody innocent has to be murdered. You often see this historically the wrong person is framed innocent, but everybody's clamoring that they're murdered, and the legal system murders them. Because if they don't, then there's going to be riots on the street because the public thinks that that person who's innocent is actually the guilty. And the public is going to riot because of the perceived injustice, and there will be 100 dead people from the riots. So as a judge, what do you do? Do you save the hundred people that might die from the riots? And let's say it's a real number. Of course, this is a hypothetical, but let's say it's a real number, or do you save the one person who is innocent? In utilitarianism, you would save the hundred people who would die, and you would sacrifice the one innocent person. A problem because now you're killing the innocent person to save other people. Even though it's an interesting line of thought, there's a lot of holes in utilitarianism. Now, on the flip side of that, there's the theory of Emmanuel Kant, which focuses on the intention of the action, not the consequence or result, but the intention. This is a great moment to examine are there objective moral laws? Because if there is an objective moral law that applies to everyone, then is the action in the intention, something that everyone can agree to. If there's something that everybody can agree to, then yes, that's a moral objective law. But what if we juxtapose this to that question we asked just a minute ago of, do we kill one person to save 100? There's no way that everybody would agree to this because that one person who's going to get killed is not going to agree to that, for sure. So this kind of puts a damper on the idea of having objective moral laws. Kind of, for now, hold that thought. There was another philosopher asking about whether there's an objective moral fact. He's one of the most famous philosophers, David Hume. And his theory when something like this. No, there is no such thing as objective moral fact because you should only believe in the existence of things that you have seen or trustworthy people have experienced. So you might have seen a tree or you might have seen other physical things, but you have never experienced an objective moral fact. Or things that exist in order to explain other things. So maybe basically, this is just saying that there aren't objective moral facts. But there is also a problem with this theory because look at how it's stated. An example of what he's talking about is, let's say you see something wrong in the world, and you feel that it's wrong, maybe somebody is getting beat up or killed, you see that it's wrong. But your experience isn't that of some objective moral fact. It's your own objective morality inside you. That's what you experience, and you don't ever get to experience the greater objective moral fact out there. And unless you can experience the objective moral fact, it doesn't exist. And that's a strong theory, but it also falls apart because there's a problem with this argument in that it itself is acting as a moral directive, because look at how it's phrased. You should only believe in the existence of things that are true, da da da da da. It's saying things as though you should. It is itself a moral and tries to act like an objective moral fact out there. So it contradicts itself almost hypocritically. So as you can see, there are great, great theories, but they just aren't sufficient. So let's jump to more modern times and see whether there's been any progress. A very popular ethicist today or at least kind of today, he published his major work in 1972 is Peter Singer. His work can be seen as a little bit radical, but let's look at it. He says that if you know that there are people out there in the world who are struggling and maybe dying of famine or not enough water, and there are people like that. We know that's a fact. How can you sit there? And not give away a part of your wealth, and at the same time, go to restaurants and coffee shops and buy luxury things or an extra car while you could have saved a life. And because of that, he says, We are all in the Western world evil. We're literally aware that people are dying and doing nothing about it. And that's evil, because we tend to think of giving things away as optional. Oh, charity is optional, but according to his theories, not giving to charity is immoral and evil. Here's an example that drives this point home. Let's say there was a shallow pond you were walking by and the child was drowning in the little pond, and you could rescue that child easily. But of course, if you rescued that child, your clothes would get muddy. It's a minor inconvenience, compared to the child dying. At first glance, this will be a no brainer. You should definitely save this child. Otherwise, you would be evil. And helping this child is not an option. It's the minimum we can do. It's what's expected. In other words, there seems to be an objective moral truth. This isn't theoretical. This is very practical. In theory, you can think, Oh, maybe yes, maybe no. But in reality, nobody would second guess that you have to save this child compared to getting your clothes muddied. Now also very important for business ethics and technology ethics is another problem that comes up immediately is the other people problem. Like, if other people are already doing something evil, it's okay if I just accept this as the norm, right? Like, if you're working for a company, let's say, Coca Cola, and today we pretty much know that Coca Cola is incredibly bad for your health and causes diabetes. And it's not the main culprit, but it's certainly a strong contributor to the global obesity epidemic to many people dying prematurely. There's a general agreement about that, but they're at the same time, tens of thousands of people working inside Coca Cola, are they evil? Because they know, I'm doing something evil, but I'm getting a paycheck and so are all my co workers. Well, if the co workers are doing it, maybe it's okay too. I I don't donate to the poor, maybe it's okay because nobody else is donating that I know, so I can look the other way because I'm not going to get any negative consequences. There's no immediate pressure from society. Even though I know it's wrong, I'm going to continue to do something that's wrong. This is incredibly common, while at the same time, there's the pressure of, Well, I have to make money, so my family can live. So I'm going to continue to participate in the evil. And that's a real issue that is very pertinent in industry ethics today. Now, before we finish, I want to go over two other philosophers that talk about morality. And one of the first philosophers who taught about this is Aristotle. Answer was actually quite on point and simple enough that you can just accept it because to him, acting virtuously will make you happy and fulfilled, not the pursuit of pleasure, the pursuit of money, the pursuit of honor, but the actual act of doing good things is what's fulfilling. And that's why you do those good things and be moral because that in itself is what fulfills you. And even though that's a little subjective, there's an incredible amount of truth in that because many people can just see that. Oh, that's right. There's a kernel of truth in this. Doing good things actually fulfills you. So that's Aristotle. But there's another philosopher, Nietzsche, who thought something incredibly different. And to be honest with you, when I first read Nietzsche, my mind was just blown because his thinking was so incredibly unconventional and fascinating. He said, Don't be moral. Forget it. He was talking about conventional morality is for the weak. Here's how that gets explained. According to Nietzsche, morality is what the weak people created to control the strong people whom they couldn't control otherwise. Imagine if you had a small society, ten weak people and one person was really strong and that one strong person can steal anything, beat up anyone, take control, become the leader because of their strength and maybe their cunning and trickery, but overall, still win. The majority who would lose had to create these kinds of morals. Don't steal, be kind, be nice, just to control and peer pressure and ultimately create laws for this to control the strong. According to Nietzsche, being humble and kind is a rule that the weak made to keep the strong down. I just wanted to mention that because it's opposite of what we tend to think of as accurate, but it's important to think about it because according to Nietzsche, we think that kindness and niceness and humility are good precisely because we are so deep in it, and we've been taught that and our parents have been taught that and their parents have been taught that. We're just so deep in it, we can't see outside of it. So since we've just gone over the major theories in ethics, not all, but the major ones, we are equipped to tackle real world industry challenges and questions because now we have the best lines of thinking and counter ideas. So moving forward, let's examine various business ethics questions by actually using and applying these incredibly strong ideas. 5. Human Nature And Ethics: Now let's discuss the biological perspective on what is human nature because today, you cannot discuss ethics and philosophy without looking at biology. In the 1500s, you could only study philosophy because philosophy was the study of nature as well. But today, so many of the questions that philosophy poses are answered by the sciences, so we almost cannot be a purist philosopher. Otherwise, we're just going to fall short and our reasoning just won't be good because there are known facts. There is no reason to ask some questions in a philosophical manner when science and biology have already answered those questions. And just to share with you my personal journey, I started with a love and a passion for philosophy. As soon as I learned about philosophy at a young age, I was just drawn to it. But I didn't really like or enjoy biology. But after university, as I continued my exploration of philosophy, I gained an absolute fascination with biology because precisely biology answers so many questions of philosophy. And one of the questions biology answers is what is human nature really? Well, that's a hard question, but it answers it largely. So let's explore this because we aren't born ethical and moral. We are born with instincts and a human nature, and somewhere along the way our human nature and instincts get augmented by ethics, and we end up with a mixture of all of them. So let's explore what is human nature and who we are at our core. Biologically speaking, what most people understand and repeat is this common phrase survival of the fittest. Whoever is the fittest and most adaptable survives. But actually, this is somewhat of a simplistic view and an outdated view. Here is the more current biological perspective. The more nuanced and modern view is that genetic reproduction and expansion is the goal. It's not just to survive. Well, what happens if you survive? Okay, that's it. It's about survival so that you can pass on your genetics. It's how every living organism has gotten to here. If it didn't, it became extinct. So the real goal is survival and genetic reproduction. Now, genetic reproduction is interesting because you want to reproduce your own genes. Also, if you have a sibling, you want them to reproduce their genes because they share so many of your genes. And if you have a second cousin and a third cousin and a fourth cousin, they also share a tremendous amount of your genetics. You want them to do well, as well, because when they reproduce, they pass on a lot of your genes. This is how herds work in the animal world. This is how families work, tribes work. Everybody has an incentive for everyone else in that tribe to do well. And you can even view entire history of mankind through the lens of seeking wealth, physical power, and expansion because that translates to your people, your tribe, passing on their genetics and ensuring that their offspring survive as well. This view doesn't come from me. It's actually one of the views in biology and the sciences. And here you might have a little pause and say, Are we really just like any other kind of animal? Well, actually, no, we're not. Everything with people is complex. You might use the genetic reproduction formula with plants, zebras, birds. And obviously, there's a lot of variation even between different species, but people have an incredible amount of complexity because of their layered societies and layered behaviors and spoken things, unspoken things. There's a lot of nuance. So this genetic perspective only helps us analyze people's behavior in a very general sense, where we also have to look at every individual in more detail if we want an accurate view of what's driving them, what are their ethics, et cetera. So with that in mind, let's examine what is the relationship of our biological makeup to our ethics? Ethics takes deep thinking. If you look at the brain, things that are human nature, things that are natural, they're almost impulsive and ethics takes a lot of thinking. A lot of the ethical thinking is done in the prefrontal cortex. That's the part of the brain that's in the front of your brain, and this is where you reason and if you get an impulse, like, hmm, I should do something bad, or I should do something just impulsive. After a few seconds, you start thinking about the situation and you think, Well, maybe that wouldn't be right or what is right? Away? Is there right or wrong? All of these kinds of deeper questions take place in the prefrontal cortex, and that's where the ethical thinking takes place is just a deeper perspective that augments your existing human nature. And the more you develop such deeper thinking, the more broadly and deeply you'll be able to reason because even though human nature is the most natural thing, humans are extremely good at re learning and adapting. So in the real world, generally speaking, ethics and morals really help to navigate society. But when it comes to survival or things that are survival like, such as what if you're working for a company and there is a layoff? For many people, the survival instinct will kick in and they'll think, I got to do what I got to do to keep my job, and I don't care what happens to the other people. They can get fired. It's okay. Or it's okay for me to cause problems to some consumers like make them unhealthy or overcharge them if it helps me survive, or if it helps me get a raise or grow my career. So a lot of people really drop ethics when it comes to their own survival or their own ability to grow and gain wealth, because we understand that growing and gaining wealth isn't just growing and gaining wealth, but it has a much, much deeper root in our human nature. It has to do with how we attract and retain mates and offspring. So it has very far reaching consequences. And for that reason, a lot of times instinctual impulses override our ethical thinking, which leads to doing evil or bad to others. So as you go through your decisions of what's ethical, what's not ethical, deeply consider, are you truly at risk of losing your money or job? Do you really need a certain promotion if it causes you to step over other people and cause them to have such injustice. You could take the Nietzschean approach where who cares about ethics the strongest wins. But as you saw, there's also a degree at which it becomes evil to do something really bad to others for a very minor gain for yourself. And that's the most practical balance that we have to toe. Yes, we have to grow ourselves, yes, but not at a deep expense or perhaps not even at any expense of others, depending on your chosen morals and so 6. Starting To Discuss Ethics And AI: So now let's take everything we learned about ethics in general and begin applying it to business ethics and ethical use of AI in business. And in this video, it's going to seem like I'm going to tear everything down and make the case to completely abolish AI. And then using the major ethical theories we learned, I'm going to bring it back up and make the case for sustained use of AI. But before we get into AI, let's look at something we already know and something we have experience in, and that is social media. Is social media ethical. While AI is much newer, we've been using social media for over a decade now. Some people might say more depending on how you define social media, but we are more or less experienced with it as a society, and we know the outcomes of it. What are some of the outcomes? There are some bad and good outcomes. Some of the bad outcomes are that younger people have higher rates of depression. Higher rates of suicide, especially in younger people have been linked to the use of social media. So if we look at it through the lens of utilitarianism, which tries to quantify the greatest pleasure versus the greatest pain, increased suicides is by such a degree an increase in pain that every benefit we get pales in comparison, like making more money. Doesn't compare to increase suicide. Life and death is much more important. It's not even comparable. Maybe we keep in touch with old friends in social media. Maybe we can grow our business. Maybe we can do other things. But none of these things compare to the horrible fact that there are higher depression rates. And because people are literally dying, applied ethics would say that we are evil if we continue to allow social media to exist in the form that it does, because it's causing more death, there's nothing more evil than this. So that's one way to look at social media by using major ethical theories. And I should state that the deductions and conclusions I'm going to be making throughout these videos are not mine, but are ones that I objectively come up with by applying the major philosophical theories. So it's not my opinion. It's my application of the philosophical theories as objectively as I can and just presenting the facts. In fact, by the end of this course, you should not know any of my opinions. The only thing you should know are philosophical facts. That's my goal as an instructor. So according to utilitarism and applied ethics, it's wildly unethical to continue social media in its current form. But at the same time, there's the Nietzschean ethics, and the Nietzschean ethics are used by the few social media marketing companies. The Twitter, now x, Facebook, Instagram, other social media companies. They are multibillion dollar companies. Their goal is not to cease existence in its current form, but to expand in its current form. Yes, they are evil, according to our definitions, but not according to the view of Nietzsche, because according to Nietzsche, there are no conventional morals. Those are just things made up by the weak and the strong have to make themselves stronger. So according to Nitzsche, the social media companies are doing the right thing. They're strong and they're making themselves stronger, and that's a virtue for themselves. In fact, if you were the CEO of such a company, it would be complete malpractice to say, Hey, let's just go out of business because it's ethical. That person would get fired and replaced by somebody who would want to grow. So it's not even really possible. So just to sum up, should we end social media? Yes, we should, in theory, but the strong companies are too strong and the weak, which is most of us are too addicted to social media, to our phones and just can't really rebel against them in any way, shape, or form. Yes, the social media companies are evil because they are even more aware of the death and suicides and depression and other negative things they are causing. They are extremely aware of them. It's their business. But nevertheless, they are doubling down on this. Even though internally they may have some governance and ethics committees, the consequence of those are extremely weak and inconsenquential because social media companies are still quite damaging to the public. A whole, if you look at it from the lens of utilitarianism and applied ethics. But nevertheless, they are going to continue moving forward stronger and stronger. And that's social media, where social media is kind of optional, kind of benign, but AI is a much bigger tidal wave. So what should happen with AI? Because at this point of our conversation, we are in a pretty dire moment because it seems like social media is evil and horrible, but it's just going to keep increasing. So even though shortly, I will introduce a more positive way to look at this, let's start thinking about the consequences of AI. You see, AI can make our lives better. Right now, it's making many people's lives better. Yes, some people are losing their jobs, but many other people are benefiting from AI. So in the short term, it's hard to quantify, but it seems like AI is having a major positive impact, which means that according to utilitarianism and actually, according to applied ethics, AI is good. It's creating a lot of pleasure. But you see, there's a caveat, because we don't know in five years, ten years, 20, 30 years, when AI becomes so, so super intelligent that it may not need us. It will completely surpass us in intelligence. Maybe it will just discard of us and kill all the people. We don't know this but if this can happen, according to utilitarianism, this will be the greatest pain there can ever be. And this is the greatest evil to us that can ever be to wipe us out. And even the greatest minds in AI have not answered the question of what's the chance of this happening? They don't know. And if it's possible, then AI is the biggest evil we have faced as a civilization ever. And the problem is that there's so much money behind the most powerful companies, the richest people in the world, the biggest lobbies are pushing it forward faster and faster. There are no breaks. With this in mind, what can possibly be the case to use AI and move it forward? You see, if we don't create AI systems, for example, I live in the United States, so I want the United States as a citizen to be the strongest in AI, or you might also think of it as I want good and I want good companies to be strong in AI so that evil companies don't become strong in AI. But if we look at it ethically and think, Oh, well, it might kill us, so we should stop it, nefarious other companies or countries or organizations will inevitably fill the space and fill the void that the ethical companies who chose not to pursue AI left. And so the unethical companies will take over, and they will be the strong and the ethical ones will be the weak because the ethical ones didn't pursue AI enough and didn't win in the AI race. And if that happens, the ethical people will be at the mercy of the companies who have the Nietzsche mentality of the strongest are the strongest, and that's where you want to be and who cares about the weak. And this also presents a utilitarian situation where this is a more short term issue that the evil AI companies will take over and control all of us. And this also represents a great pain, which is also something we try to avoid. So what are some solutions to this? Obviously, the first solution is stop AI, but you cannot do that because you can't guarantee that everybody else will stop AI. There is no global agreement. So the other solution is to become the best in AI to defend yourself from bad players and evil users of AI. And precisely this is the ethical argument for mastering and accelerating in AI in that there are multiple greatest evils that AI wipes us out or that other humans who master AI wipe us out. And the humans who master AI wiping us out is a more near term, more realistic scenario because humans and history have done this to each other many, many times or at least have tried to do this to each other many, many times. And to defend ourselves against that is the case to pursue AI ethically, knowing full well that if we pursue AI too much, it can become so powerful that it destroys us all, and we just have to hope for the best in that we toe that line long term. Stay competitive ourselves while not making AI so strong that it gets rid of us. 7. Will AI Cause People To Lose Jobs: Now let's talk about something that's on the mind of so many people. Will AI automation take all our jobs? It's a very serious question. This question involves a lot of stress, a lot of hardship, a lot of uncertainty, anxiety. It's one of the more serious questions as a society that we should face and answer today, and we should answer and look at it with all the seriousness and compassion that we can. If you look at it in this framing, like, AI will take our jobs, then of course, it seems like AI is quite the evil, even if it doesn't kill us long term, for many people, it will cause an incredible pain. There's just tremendous pain from the stress and financial loss of losing a job. It's unquestionable. And if AI is a tidal wave that's coming, this is more of a reality than an ethical question. Like, we can't stop this tidal wave from happening. We would like for everybody to keep their jobs. Of course, that would be nice. But even if you take AI out of the equation, so many new technologies cause disruption in the marketplace and cause many of the old jobs to simply disappear. And new jobs to reappear. Like the horse and buggy was a job that was destroyed by the invention of an automobile. And, of course, the taxi driver was a job that was created by the invention of an automobile. In fact, more jobs were created, but it was a tidal wave. It's not something that's stoppable. And even if CEOs try to refrain from the evil of AI because they don't want to destroy the current jobs and leave their employees unemployed, they'll just go out of business because the company next door we use AI automation, innovate more, increase productivity, and just win. So long term, simply turning a blind eye to AI automation is not the winning strategy. In fact, it's the losing strategy. In fact, it may be a benevolent thing you might want to do in the short term. That may have a horrible outcome because then your entire company may go out of business if you don't adopt as a company and if you don't evolve. So let me talk about the contrasting part of this conversation where the good is here. Good is that for people who master this new AI technology or actually any new technology, that mastery of this new technology can propel those individuals in their career by writing this tidal wave instead of getting hit by it. And, of course, there is short term pain that forces people to reinvent themselves by gaining greater skills and having different accomplishments. There is this short term pain, but the people who get greater skills will get greater accomplishments and they'll likely get those accomplishments sooner if they adopt. So people who are open to it and ride the wave and learn and adopt will have outsized results. Not to mention that if you're a company, there is less good in keeping people in old jobs, even though that may seem like the intuitive initial answer let's try to preserve the jobs we have and do our best and roll up our sleeves and every person will do more, etc, et cetera. That's the intuitive solution, but it's not the right solution because there's more good in helping the employees you have reskill for the future, help them learn, keep them on staff, but help them reskill and adapt to the new environment. So don't be blind to the tidal wave that's coming, but create a company culture of adaptation and reskilling and constantly learning and maybe help to fund some of that. That your employees can level up their skills and evolve. And then your employees will be grateful to you and you'll have a stronger workforce while still being ethical and helping people retain their jobs. 8. Policies And AI: Now let's examine the relationship between artificial intelligence and innovation in the space and the law and legislation that is also in this space, and they are very much not the same or similar. Like, usually in established fields, you would expect not 100% overlap between the laws and the ethics of that field, but a large overlap, that's the hope that they would agree and converge over time. But AI is such a new field that law and legislation is trailing innovation in AI. And law trails innovation for two reasons. It does so in part as a natural phenomenon just because it's a new field, and of course, law takes a little while to catch up. That's natural. No problem there. But the other side of this coin is that the gap between the laws and the innovation is artificially manufactured. By the rich companies that lobby the government to give them maximum freedom to do whatever they want, because they say we have to be competitive internationally, et cetera, et cetera, but they don't want to slow down due to any legislation. Partially, that makes sense. You don't want to stifle technology by early legislation, but also partially, you don't want to let a group of people run amuck with something that's more powerful potentially than nuclear weapons. At the same time, those people are very rich, so they get a green light for everything. That's just the reality. And if you think that the laws that will be passed are going to be helpful, that's only going to be partially true because the laws that will eventually be passed to regulate some of the innovation and scenarios in AI, those laws will be tremendously influenced by those very same companies who now say Let's have no laws because we need to figure this out of what's best for us. And when they figure out what's best for us, they're going to work with the government to create laws that will likely help them to stay in business and become stronger, if not fully then at least partially because they are the ones who are supporting the politicians and have very strong control over what the politicians actually decide to do. This is not even necessarily specific to AI. This has been the pattern for many different technologies, not all but many. So what should you expect when it comes to laws and ethics in AI? And can we really rely on the legal system to uphold some kind of ethics here? From my thinking about it and from my deductions and conclusions, the best I can see is that true ethics of AI and what the legislation of AI will be will have less overlap than you would want or than it is historically accurate for many other industries. And we can expect that less than usual overlap to go on for a long time. And so I'm going to introduce a term that's just for us, me and you, to understand things better and to help our own discourse. I'm going to introduce the term that's called typically evil. Typically evil companies are companies that are not that evil by societal perceptions, but they are just kind of evil, you know, like Coca cola. Like, Hey, you know, we're causing people to gain weight, and we're causing increasing diabetes. But, you know, like, we're not seen as completely evil. We're just regular evil because there's a whole other layer of evil of organizations and governments that deliberately try to hurt you. Those companies aren't that. They're just a regular evil. They know they're causing evil. But as long as things are hush, hush, they're going to continue doing what they've been doing. For those companies, they're going to reap the benefits of having very little AI regulation, and they're going to be able to do whatever they want. Steal data? Sure. Have no privacy. Sure. Tell customers whatever customers want to hear. Sure. There's no legislation. Steal paid content to train your AI models. Sure, no problem. It's a black box. The users don't actually know what's underneath the hood. All those things, yeah, yeah, no problem, as long as we can get away with it, and they can get away with it because there's no legislation. Now, here's the real problem. Well, actually, that's already a problem, but here's the real real problem that deliberately nefarious organizations also have nothing to hold them back because there are no laws and legislation is trailing. So in your company, if you're looking at legislation around AI, there is some, but it's going to be so vague and limited. It's not that useful. So if you want to have a truly ethical and correctly ethical company in a way that doesn't stifle innovation, but it's also just doing the right thing, you wouldn't look for laws and legislation to guide you because they are just so few and far in between. What you would look for are the business landscape you're in, the ethical challenges NAI you're facing, and you would go through your own process of thinking and examining AI ethics challenges. And coming up with the right path for you that, yes, keeps your company competitive, but also as good as possible. That's the tight rope that we have to walk here because there isn't any legislation that's coming around to help us in any near term when it comes to ethically using AI. 9. Ethics With Which Businesses Typically Operate: Now let's examine the ethics with which businesses typically operate. And obviously, different businesses operate differently. So there is no one method for all businesses, but there are generalities which we're going to discuss here. Also, it's important to understand that businesses apply very different ethics in different scenarios, like when they interface with clients, the ethics are very different than internal operations and in other scenarios. So let's examine them one by one. When businesses look at competitors, generally speaking, the ethics and morals are Nietzsche, that the strongest wins by any means necessary. They have to out compete the competitors by any means necessary, as long as it doesn't backfire, as long as it's not legal or as long as something embarrassing doesn't get out into the public, so as long as the company can operate as it does, any means necessary is fine. It sounds really harsh, but otherwise it will be malpractice. If you're a CEO and across the street, there's another CEO, your job is to out compete that one, if they're cheating and you're playing fair, of course, you would never want to cheat. It's not how most of us are brought up, but if the other company is cheating and you're playing fair, they are just going to get a bunch of advantages if all other things are equal and win. So you have to do whatever you can do to win. So the strongest wins, this doesn't sound beautiful, and it really isn't generally, it's just how it is because companies in a free market just have to do whatever they can to win. It's a little harsh. Don't blame me. I didn't create the system, and the system is actually not bad as a whole. But it does have this kind of a negative aspect. Now, on the other hand, when it comes to treating customers, businesses apply mostly a utilitarian style ethics. It's not really ethics, but more of an approach, but it's easy to perceive that businesses don't try to make everybody happy. Businesses look at what is our target market? And whoever is in the target market, businesses try to satisfy tremendously and give them the greatest good. While whoever is not in the target market, while they're not in the target market, they're not a potential customer. We don't have to satisfy them at all. So businesses generally maximize good for their ideal clients. That's actually how they win in a free market. The more good you create for your clients, the more competitive you are. No brainer there. There's not much of a discussion here. But where there is a lot of room for discussion is internal company operations. For example, how does a company approach its energy and resource consumption? What about ethically examining what the company does? Like, if you're Coca Cola and you're making people overweight, should you just dissolve your company? Some people would say, definitely yes, but of course, if you're the CEO or the board member of Coca Cola, you would say, of course, no, you have to make money. They would just get fired and get replaced by people who would make money. And of course, if you're looking internally at company operations, you also have to examine employee happiness. Are your employees miserable, or do you want to keep your employees happy? And of course, there's the question of distribution of wealth. Do you pay your employees well below market, above market value? Do you charge your customers more or less? If you can, obviously, pricing depends on many factors, but all things being equal, if you can charge more, do you charge more those kinds of questions. You see different companies answer these questions very, very differently. If you look at modern applied ethics that suggests that if you know you're doing a bad thing, just stop it. Like, get out of theory. If your employees are miserable, spend time and resources to make them happier. If you are making customers sick, unhealthy, overweight, or unhappy in other ways, stop it. Every employee who's working on Coca Cola, and I'm sorry for picking Coca cola. I don't have anything directly against Coca Cola more than any other company, but it's just an example we are using. I can use most food or consumer packaged goods companies, and there's a degree of evil. They overuse and over rely on plastics which end up in the oceans. So it doesn't just damage us but also the wildlife. Their supply chains take up incredible amounts of energy at the end of the day, they don't do that much good for their customers and sometimes just get bad results for the customers. So many, many companies, if you really examine them, are pretty evil. And I don't say this because it's my personal view. I actually don't want to share my personal views because you shouldn't know my personal views. Here, this is a philosophical outlook, and I'm using only philosophical theories and philosophical conclusions. So according to applied ethics, if you know you're doing a bad thing, because contributing to obesity contributes higher mortality rates. That's evil. You don't have to be a genius to know that. Yet, despite that, the consumer package goods and other similar companies employ millions of people who just go to work every day knowing that, for the most part, they are not doing good and doing evil, but they are continuing to do that evil. So it's very Nize. Whoever has the money, whoever has the power, just makes more money, that's what they do. They frame themselves internally and externally as very ethical and hop on the latest trends of social media, like, whatever the social media trend of today is, many such companies quickly hop on on those bandwagons to make themselves look like they are benevolent. Oh, yeah, we are helping this, we're helping that. No, you are causing an incredible amount of damage and trying to make up for it. Why don't you stop making the damage first. But most people just kind of see it, Oh, yeah, you Everyone is passing by someone who's drowning. So I'll just pass by someone who's drowning. You saw this earlier as the other people problems. Other people problem. Oh, somebody else will help the drowning, so I'm not going to help. And so everybody ends up walking by these issues, even though there's a lot of evil. Now, you may say that despite the evil, these companies actually feed people. And they feed people for cheaper prices because of the ultra processed foods, those foods can be made cheaper, and so fewer people starve in the world. I don't know if Coca cola, the soft drink is really helping to curb starvation, so it's kind of a fake argument. But there is some argument like that that's valid for some of the consumer packaged goods and some of the foods, but not nearly all. So you can say, yes, some of these companies, while they create some amount of pain, also creates some amount of good, like affordable food, but also some of these companies just create frivolous products that produce nearly no real good or no substantial good and a very, very high amount of pain, and they know it, but they do it despite this. So that's just a way to look at how companies approach different aspects of their operations through the lens of different ethical theories. 10. Most Common Questions In AI Ethics: Now let's go over the biggest and most common questions in AI ethics. Obviously, we can go through, every question and answer deeply. So a lot of it is to make sure that you understand what are the pertinent issues and then think about which of these general pertinent issues relate to your unique business scenario. And also, very important Philosophy, as you see, doesn't really answer questions. It just provides tremendous frameworks. But sometimes you're left with open ended challenges that just don't have a clear solution. So as we go through these questions, feel welcome to chime in and post in the Q&A of this video in the comments about which of the ethical questions in AI are ones that you're concerned with, you're thinking about, and what are your thoughts on them? I want to know, and I'll comment back and hopefully we can have a conversation as a community and continue the dialogue in a more interactive way. So let's go over these questions. It's important to break these questions down into short term questions and long term questions. Let's start with short term questions. Right now, if you're building AI systems or working with them, one of the biggest questions is, how do you mitigate bias in AI? Because AI systems learn from some prior works which may or may not have bias. There's a tremendous black box in the reasoning of AI. There are millions of computation you need to detect bias so that AI gives you fair answers. Also, there are many legal issues like copyright issues because you don't know whose works were used to train the AI and whose works are largely in the new works that AI used. There's also issues of credit attribution, like how do you attribute credit to somebody if you don't know that their work was used? And what if the AI model learned from a paid work, but it's creating free content that's unfair to the original creator. Also, there are issues with data use and consumer privacy concerns. These are very pertinent today that have to be addressed. There are many more questions. For example, what do you do in case of deep fakes or fraud? For example, today, I can take a photo of me and a sample of my voice and create a video pretending that it's me saying something that I would never say, and that can be used for fraud and all kinds of nefarious things that I would never even know until after I get in trouble for it. So we have to think about the transparency of how the algorithms work and transparency of whether we tell the consumers of how the content was created and whether it was AI generated or human generated. And, of course, there are issues of privacy, like facial recognition. We really want our face to be recognized everywhere? The near term questions related to AI just don't end. There are also questions of energy consumption. AI systems require tremendous amounts of energy and not all energy is clean energy. Even clean energy isn't that clean. If you consider solar panels and think, solar panels, the energy comes from the sun, but how do you create the solar panels? There's a lot of polluting, manufacturing, and material use that's necessary to create solar panels. And if you ask the experts, politicians, scientists, they tend to give varying answers. There isn't a consensus. And if experts don't agree, how can regular people understand how much energy and resource consumption really goes into creating AI systems, how much of it is bad, how much of it is really reusable, it's just impossible to know. So how can we make ethical decisions where the variables are just unknown? And of course, my challenge for you is, can you think of additional questions? These are just a small sample. These are just the most pertinent, but there are so many other ethical questions related to AI that I want to hear your perspectives and if there's anything you're thinking of. So these are near term questions. Now, there's also long term questions like, will AI take over what will happen to the human race after AI is smarter than all of us? It's a scary thing. The outcome can be very negative. And of course, can people actually collaborate on this across countries without competing so much that we misuse the technology to destroy all of us? These are long term, but they're kind of mid term because this technology is growing so rapidly that this could be a very pertinent question in three to five years or even ten years. That's within most of our lifetimes. So these are all things we should think about as individuals, but also when we're working at companies, we have to make sure that within our companies, we think through these issues deeply and hopefully be able to choose the best path forward. 11. AI Use Creating Work - Self Assessment: With this video, let's do a little self assessment and treat this as a test. I'm going to give you a few ethical questions when it comes to the use of AI, and in the next video, I'm going to give you my answers. But in this video, I'm going to give you issues to think about. And specifically, it's going to be around the topic of, is it ethical to profit from AI generated work. This is arguably one of the greatest topics of discourse today. Some people say, No way, I would never use AI for creative work, but others use it all the time. Should you use it? Should you not use it? If you use it, should you disclose and of course, there are many additional considerations when it comes to this. Like, for example, if you do want to disclose that AI helped you with your work, you don't actually know the original work or works that it used to create your work. So even though you can disclose that you use AI, you could not give credit to original creator and certainly could not repay them if you profit because the AI is kind of just a black box. You don't know what it does behind the scenes. It doesn't tell you if it used one original work or 1 million to help you with your queries or your content. You just don't know. It's not something that they share with users. So how do you approach this situation where even if you're honest with your readers or customers or content consumers that use AI, how do you handle the fact that you can't give credit to the original creators? And where do you draw the line in disclosure? Like, did the AI help you create everything, like, a whole novel that it wrote for you, you just copied and pasted it and said, Hey, it's mine, or did AI help you with one word, and the rest of it is something that you wrote? So there are varying degrees of AI's involvement, and of course, there are varying degrees of responsibility that you carry. For example, if you're giving medical advice and creating content about medical advice or financial advice, and you're just using AI and you have no idea about it, but you're pretending to be an expert, that's very different from if you're just writing some kind of a marketing text that's a lot more benign in nature. As you can see, I outlined a few issues. But, you know, when it comes to ethics, which is philosophy, there are usually unlimited number of questions and very few answers, but there are more and more and more questions and always more and more things to think about and evaluate things from different angles. So the real self assessment here is for you to think through it. Should you use AI for your works, if you do how much, to what extent, how much to disclose, should you disclose at all when to disclose? Those are the things that you should think about. You don't have to have complete answers because these are philosophical questions. They take time to think about. You may change your answers depending on if you think about it for one day or one week or one month, your answers will mature. But at least try to think about it before the next video starts because in the next video, I'm going to give you some industry standard for how AI derived work is treated today so that you'll be able to compare your answers. And just as a few hints and food for thought, I want to give you some practices that are currently used. For example, if you have a co author, not AI, but a human co author or human editor, right now, you disclose that, right? You have a specific field in a book or a blog post for people who made large contributions, but not tiny contributions. Somebody who's a co author usually means they contributed a significant amount. Also, when it comes to quoting books or other works. If you use direct quotes, you usually credit the quote. But if you paraphrase, usually you don't give credit. These are just some standards we have now. These are by no means applicable to all situations, but just a few little tidbits for you to use as foods for thought. But think about the questions I asked earlier in this video so that in the next video, you can compare your thoughts on this to the standards I'm going to present to you. 12. AI Content Creation Ethics - Answers: Now let's go over your self assessment test and examine whether it's ethical to profit from AI generated work and to what extent? So I'm just going to walk you through some of the answers. The first issue is, we don't know who the original creators were, so it's hard to credit them. So it's okay not to give credit to the original creators because you simply physically cannot do that. Even if you want to, you just can't but if you are aware of original works that yours may be similar to what you should not do is imitate original works or have new works that very, very closely resemble other works, and obviously, you should not claim credit for your original work then, if you're aware of such works existing, if you're not, obviously, you can't give credit. So it's really about your intention. Remember, when it comes to ethics, you have to consider your intention and the result you are after. So if your intention is copy other works, imitate or take credit for somebody else's work. That's obviously unethical. But also, you should consider not just the intention, but the outcome, which is, did it accidentally occur. And certainly, you should not be falsely claiming originality of specific ideas. Like if you are aware of some idea in the world and the AI gave you that idea as well, you should not say, Oh, you know, I directed AI, so now it's my idea. If you're aware that idea is out there, don't falsely claim that you came up with it. Pretty common sense so far. And you might think of this as analogous to current scenarios, like if you're a writer or an employee somewhere or doing some kind of creative work, you were influenced in your education by thousands of books or instructional texts, many of which you kind of synthesized, but forgot where you got your knowledge, which knowledge comes from where, so you couldn't credit, even if you wanted to. Similarly, if you were a teacher, you couldn't synthesize years and years of your own learning into just, Hey, I got this idea from this work because a lot of it is you just became better and better at your craft over the years. So sometimes you just can't give credit, but you should certainly not say, Hey, this is my idea. I came up with it. And so the ethical red line is passing off AI created or AI assisted work as fully original and yours, that's not ethical. May be legal in some cases, but it's not ethical. Now, what about cases of AI assisted work? It depends on how much of the work was done by AI and how crucial the contribution was. It's generally accepted as ethically fine if you guide the AI, but after that, you proofread the AI's work, edit the AI's work, and used AI as an employee we already use many productivity tools like calculators, spell check, photoshop, and other software and other non AI tools that just enhance our work. So why not use AI to also enhance our work? If we still take responsibility for the work, we edit the work, it fits what we're already trying to say, and it just makes it more productive to use AI. Why not use AI? So it's similar to all the common artists and professionals today, even companies, you often don't know if your favorite artist has a team of just one themselves or 1,000 people working in the background and how much of their work is contributed by their employees versus them. Sometimes, you know, an artist says, Boy, I write original lyrics, but sometimes you don't know do they write the melodies of songs? Do they edit their books? How much do they edit? You have no idea, and they don't actually disclose the extent to which they got help. Sometimes they might give a very high level overview of how much help they got, but you really don't know the details. And that's been fine. No one's complained prior to that. Before we use AI. So why should AI change things? AI can be seen just as an employee. But certainly there are cases where AI assisted work is unethical. Here are some examples. For example, if you give a prompt to AI, write me this book, and you just copy and paste the output, no judgment, no editing, no taking responsibility of what the book says, if the book should eat candy to lose weight. Are you going to take responsibility for people who have a bad outcome? If yes, okay, fine, but in many cases, people would avoid responsibility or try to. So a question you may ask is, if the output causes harm or error, are you the one who's going to accept responsibility? Because if you were to accept responsibility, you would test a lot and be much more thorough than just using AI to prompt, copy published. Same thing with an employee. An employee might do something. You would test test test, have multiple iterations of testing before putting something crucial in the hands of consumers. So if your answer is yes, you would take responsibility, then it's ethically defensible. So now let's talk about how much to disclose about how much the AI helped you. Most people don't disclose if they used a word editor, a spell checker, a calculator, a software, one employee, 20 employees. They don't disclose that. And non disclosure is usually fine in low stakes content, general topic, blogposts, summaries, marketing, copy. It's interesting, but it's not crucial whether you got help from any software or AI. There are cases where it really matters. In case of journalism, academic papers, political persuasion, cases of medical, legal, or financial advice, then it would be ethically responsible to disclose that you used AI and how much AI was used and how much of your own team expertise was used. Disclosure can be tricky because there are some gray areas. So let's talk a little bit about what you should think about when it comes to disclosure of AI assisted or AI generated work. So if the audience trust would change drastically, if they knew that you were not the expert, but AI was the expert who made the content, should disclose, of course. So if disclosure is just interesting, it's not that necessary. But when it really matters to the consumer's perception and their trust, then it's obviously ethical to disclose. So now let's talk a little bit about what's generally accepted and what's not accepted as ethical when it comes to profiting from AI generated or assisted. Things that are okay are profiting from AI assisted the work. Many people have done that. Many companies have done that. It's fine. Not giving credit to the training data is fine because you just don't know what the training data was, and you don't always, always, always have to disclose the use of AI, only when it matters. So the cases when it's not okay to profit from AI generated works, if you claim expertise that you don't have and you're hiding the fact that AI made it and you have no expertise or little expertise, you should disclose that AI made it, especially if human trust and safety depends on it. Also, it's not ethical if you're going to evade responsibility for your work, or in other words, if you're going to evade responsibility for whatever the AI made, then that's not ethical AI use. Hopefully that helps to summarize the views on what's ethical and what's not ethical with AI. Generally, you should also consider that if you're an AI purist and you say, you know, I'm just going to do everything human made, then you know other people who use AI generally ethically and use it as a productivity tool will outperform you just because they're using a tool and you're not. So you also want to consider how fair it is to yourself if you completely say no to AI because a lot of people today are saying completely no to AI. To their own detriment because the person next to them who use AI may just out compete them, so it may also ethically not be good to yourself to completely disregard AI. So also, you want to consider, do you want to lose out on opportunity, especially crucial and high stakes opportunities, just to preserve some kind of creativity, purity. So these are ideas just to start thinking about it, but certainly not the end of the thinking about it.