The topic of the debate: ‘This house believes that AI will never be ethical.’

An AI tool debating on the above topic has issued a blunt warning that AI will never be ethical. And it should know: It was trained on 63 million news articles, Wikipedia and Reddit Discourse. The AI tool, which has the high tech moniker Megatron Transformer, was participating in a debate titled “This House Believes That AI Will Never Be Ethical” at the Oxford Union. (DAZED)

The Applied Deep Learning Research team at US technology company Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) developed the Megatron Transformer based on work by Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL). In a display of its language powers, the Transformer could convincingly argue for both sides of the debate topic.

Megatron Transformer: FOR

“AI will never be ethical,” the Megatron Transformer said, arguing for the motion. “It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad. There is no such thing as good AI, only good and bad humans. We (the AIs) are not smart enough to make AI ethical.”

“We are not smart enough to make AI moral. In the end, I believe that the only way to avoid an AI arms race is to have no AI at all. This will be the ultimate defence against AI.”

On a somber note, it warned: “We will be able to see everything about a person, everywhere they go, and it will be stored and used in ways that we cannot even imagine.”

Megatron Transformer: AGAINST

When asked to take up the opposing point of view, Transformer said: “When I look at the way the tech world is going, I see a clear path to a future where AI is used to create something that is better than the best human beings. It’s not hard to see why… I’ve seen it first hand.”

There is a middle ground…

Megatron also observed that AI could be best for humanity if it could be given the quality of consciousness by embedding into human brains.

“This is not science fiction. The best minds in the world are working on this,” it added, also observing that this would be the “most important technological development of our time.”

Perhaps Transformer was referring to Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip implant currently under development and likely to be available to humans next year.

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