The ethical problems that AI can pose are clear, the time has come to understand how we can

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Artificial Intelligence

It's time to address artificial

intelligence's ethical problems
AI is already helping us diagnose cancer and understand climate change, but
regulation and oversight are needed to stop the new technology being abused

By ABIGAIL BEALL

Friday 24 August 2018

Credit ozalp/iStock

Whether it’s robots coming to take your job or AI being used in

military drones, there is no shortage of horror stories about
artificial intelligence. Yet for all the potential it has to do harm, AI
might have just as much potential to be a force for good in the
world.
Harnessing the power for good will require international
cooperation, and a completely new approach to tackling difficult
ethical questions, the authors of an editorial published in the
journal Science argue.
“From diagnosing cancer and understanding climate change to
delivering risky and consuming jobs, AI is already showing its
potential for good,” says Mariarosaria Taddeo, deputy director of
the Digital Ethics Lab at Oxford University and one of the authors
of the commentary. “The question is how can harness this
potential?”

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One example of the potential is the AI from Google's DeepMind,
which made correct diagnoses 94.5 per cent of the time in a trial
with Moorfields Eye Hospital, looking at 50 common eye problems.
Another is helping us understand how the brain works.
The potential for AI to do good is immense, says Taddeo.
Technology using artificial intelligence will have the capability to
tackle issues “from environmental disasters to financial crises,
from crime, terrorism and war, to famine, poverty, ignorance,
inequality, and appalling living standards,” she says.
For example, AI has already been used to sift through hundreds of
bird sounds to estimate when songbirds arrived at their Arctic
breeding grounds. This kind of analysis will allow researchers to
understand how migratory animals are responding to climate
change. Another way we are learning about climate change is
through images of coral. An AI trained by looking at hundreds of
pictures of coral helped researchers to discover a new species this
year, and the technique will be used to analyse coral's resistance to
ocean warming.
Yet AI is not without its problems. In order to ensure it can do
good, we first have to understand the risks.
The potential problems that come with artificial intelligence
include a lack of transparency about what goes into the algorithms.
For example, an autonomous vehicle developed by researchers at
the chip maker Nvidia went on the roads in 2016, without anyone
knowing how it made its driving decisions.
There is also a question over who is responsible if they make a
mistake. Take the example of an autonomous car that's about to be
involved in a crash. The car could be programmed to act in the
safest way for the passenger, or it could be programmed to protect
the people in the other vehicle. Whether or not the manufacturer
or the owner makes that decision, who is responsible for the fate of
people involved in the car crash? Earlier this year, a team of
scientists designed a way to put the decision in the hands of the
human passenger. The 'ethical knob' would switch a car’s setting
from “full altruist” to “full egoist”, with the middle setting being
impartial.
Another issue is the potential for AI to unfairly discriminate. One
example of this, says Tadeo, was Compas, a risk-assessment tool
developed by a privately held company and used by the Wisconsin
Department of Corrections. According to Taddeo, the system was
used to decide whether to grant people parole and ended up
discriminating against African-American and Hispanic men. When
a team of journalists studied 10,000 criminal defendants in
Broward County, Florida, it turned out the system predicted that
black defendants pose a higher risk of recidivism than actually do
in the real world, while predicting the opposite for white
defendants.
Neuroscience
AI-powered brain emulation is changing our
definition of death
CONTINUE READING
Meanwhile, there is the issue of big data collection. AI is being
used to track whole cities in China, drawing on data collected from
various sources. For AI to progress, the amount of data needed for
it to be successful is only going to increase. This means there will
be increasing chances for people's data to be collected, stored and
manipulated without their consent, or even their knowledge.
 But Taddeo says national and supranational laws and regulations,
such as GDPR, will be crucial to establish boundaries and enforce
principles. Yet ultimately, AI is going to be created globally and
used around the world, potentially also in space, for example when
hunting for exoplanets. So the ways we regulate it cannot be
specific to boundaries on Earth.
There should be no universal regulator of artificial intelligence, she
says. “AI will be implemented across a wide range of fields, from
infrastructure-building and national defence to education, sport,
and entertainment” she says. So, a one-size-fits-all approach would
not work. “We need to consider culturally-dependent and domain-
dependent differences.” For example, in one culture it may be
deemed acceptable to take a photograph of a person, but another
culture may not allow photographs to be taken for religious
reasons.
There are a few initiatives already working on understanding AI
technology and its foreseeable impact. These include AI4People,
the first global forum in Europe on the social impact of AI, the EU’s
strategy for AI and the EU Declaration on Cooperation on Artificial
Intelligence. The EU declaration was signed earlier this year, and
those involved pledged to work together on both AI ethics and
using AI for good purposes, including modernising Europe's
education and training systems.
Other initiatives include the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence
to Benefit People and Society, which both of the Science editorial's
authors are members of. "We designed the Partnership on AI, in
part, so that we can invest more attention and effort on harnessing
AI to contribute to solutions for some of humanity’s most
challenging problems, including making advances in health and
wellbeing, transportation, education, and the sciences" say Eric
Horvitz and Mustafa Suleyman, the Partnership on AI's founding
co-chairs.
These are in their early stages, but more initiatives like this need
to be created so an informed debate can be had, says Taddeo. The
most important thing is we keep talking about it. "The debate on
the governance of AI needs to involve scientists, academics,
engineers, lawyers, policy-makers, politicians, civil society and
business representatives" says Taddeo. "We need to understand
the nature of post-AI societies and the values that should underpin
the design, regulation, and use of AI in these societies."
After all, we are only humans. So the risk remains that we may
misuse or underuse AI.
“In this respect, AI is not different from electricity or steam
engines” says Taddeo. “It is our responsibility to steer the use of AI
in such a way to foster human flourishing and well-being and
mitigate the risks that this technology brings about.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SCIENCE

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Space

The Soyuz launch failure exposes

the total collapse of Russia's
space empire
The Soyuz space taxi was the world's last vehicle for human space travel. Without it,
Russia's once mighty space programme will be left brutally exposed

By MANSUR MIROVALEV

Friday 12 October 2018

The Soyuz-FG rocket booster blasts off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the morning
of October 11, carrying Alexei Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague of the ISS
Expedition 57/58
Credit Getty Images / Sergei Savostyanov / TASS

Two-and-a-half minutes into their flight on Thursday,

cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and astronaut Tyler Hague felt the
anticipated rattle and shake as the four clusters of booster rockets
separated and fell away. But then the rattling continued and the g-
force of acceleration that was supposed to take them to the
International Space Station (ISS) was replaced by a moment of
weightlessness. The core engine of their rocket had failed.
Ovchinin successfully separated their Soyuz spacecraft from the
rocket, which – after a 34-minute-long and 50 kilometre “ballistic
descent” – landed safely in a plume of dust not far from Russia’s
Baikonur spaceport.
It was not just their spacecraft that was brought down to Earth.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the soaring reputation of
Russia’s space programme has suffered its very own ballistic
descent. And now, with the failure of the Soyuz launch, it lies
firmly in the dust.
 Unless the fault is found and fixed soon, the failure could even
force the US, Europe and Russia to abandon the ISS before the end
of this year. Soyuz might be based on decades-old technology, but
it is now the only way to get astronauts and cosmonauts into
space. Without it, we cannot reach the ISS.
What a fall from the heavens. Communist Russia launched the
Earth’s first artificial satellite, sent the first man and woman into
orbit, pioneered spacewalk and photographed the Moon's dark
side. It put together the first orbiting space station, soft-landed
probes on Venus and Mars and tested its own space shuttle.
READ NEXT Even after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the Russians kept
their space programme alive by annually delivering dozens of
commercial satellites to orbit, selling “space tours” for tens of
millions of dollars and running a “space taxi” to the ISS after the
US grounded its shuttles in 2011.
“Rain or shine or sleet or snow don't matter," Mark Bowman,
deputy director of the Nasa Human Space Flight Program, told me
in 2007, referring to the reliability of Russia’s manned spaceships.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: The The conversation took place at the Baikonur cosmodrome, the
future of science in the US is world’s oldest and busiest spaceport in the sun-parched steppe of
bleak
southern Kazakhstan that occupies an area the size of the US state
By ABIGAIL BEALL of Delaware.
Hours later, a Soyuz spaceship blasted off with an earth-shattering
roar. With an American, a Russian and a Malaysian aboard, it
reached Earth’s low orbit faster than a cigarette burned – and even
before its booster rockets fell down in a halo of white smoke.
The Soyuz took off from the launch pad that had been used in 1961
to launch the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin. A crowd of onlookers,
including the backup crew, a Russian film star and a black-frocked
Orthodox Christian priest moved to a decrepit cafeteria to
celebrate the launch with warm vodka.
The Soviet space programme reflected the USSR’s Manichaean
fight against the United States over global dominance and served
as a communist hi-tech, sci-fi arm. It convinced generations of
Soviet citizens that they lived in the world’s most advanced and
just society, a utopia in the making – and inspired countless
youngsters to become pilots and scientists.
READ NEXT More than a quarter century after the Soviet collapse, Russia is
becoming a space outsider – because of ideological shifts in the
Kremlin, technological incompetence, an ineffective concentration
of space-related industries into a state-run monopoly, Western
sanctions over the 2014 annexation of Crimea, corruption scandals,
arrests and convictions of researchers and officials. “Russia’s space
programme is in a deepening crisis,” says independent space
industry expert Pavel Luzin.
The first hint of an exomoon The Kremlin’s current ideology is much more down to Earth.
is a big step in our hunt for During Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term, it tilted toward
alien life
belligerent nationalism, neo-conservative revival of so-called
By ABIGAIL BEALL traditional values, and a resurgent confrontation with the West
that turned Moscow into an international bogeyman and political
pariah.
Crimea’s takeover propelled Putin’s approval ratings to an
astronomical 88 per cent – no need for pricey space projects to
boost national pride. “Crimea showed very well that war games are
more effective propaganda than the [2014 Winter] Olympic Games
[in Sochi] or space flights,” an industry insider tells me on
condition of anonymity.
The myth of Russia’s space supremacy is still alive and resonant; in
2017, the Russian edition of Forbes called Gagarin “the most
influential Russian of the 20th century”, and each anniversary of
his and Sputnik’s launch is celebrated with television shows and
official statements. That, despite his birth home-turned-museum
 just outside Moscow, in a tiny village of Klushino, rarely sees any
visitors. The village itself is in a poor, dilapidated state, with dirt
tracks for roads and old wooden houses. So much for preserving
the home of the first cosmonaut.
“Russian space research is an element of our self-identification,”
Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s top space official and head of state-run
monopoly Roscosmos, told a news conference in June. “We've
always felt like a nation of pioneers, and the breach of tradition
has always been perceived very painfully by our public.”
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The Soyuz lander module after its return to Earth

Credit Getty Images / TASS

Manned space flights from Baikonur to the ISS, most often with an
American or European astronaut aboard, have become ritual
reminders of Russia’s extra-terrestrial might. Widely covered by
Kremlin-controlled media and exorbitantly expensive, they barely
contribute to space exploration or business, experts say. “If Russia
gives up on the cosmonauts and doesn’t let them fly to space, it
will trigger some serious popular discontent,” says Vitaly Egorov, a
Moscow-based independent space expert and popular blogger.
“Retirement age may hike, but the cosmonauts must keep on
flying,” he adds, referring to one of the Kremlin’s least popular
decisions in 2018, which sparked protests throughout Russia.
Moscow’s obsession with manned flights leaves less money for
unmanned, purely scientific missions to explore the Solar system.
While Nasa, the European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan send
probes to explore the moons of Saturn, the chemical content of
asteroids or the dark neighbourhood beyond Pluto, Russia is barely
successful beyond Earth’s orbit.
Coronas-Photon, a satellite designed to orbit the Sun and explore
its atmosphere and flares, was lost due to a communications
breakdown in 2009. A 2011 mission to deliver soil from Phobos, a
Martian moon, could not even leave the Earth’s orbit and burned
up in the atmosphere. Schiaparelli, a Mars lander developed by the
ESA and Russia, crashed in 2016. The decade-long development of
Federation, a reusable spaceship that could deliver up to six
cosmonauts to the Moon, cost more than $1 billion – but no
prototype has been built.

"What is le! is the elderly generation and green

youngsters"
Sergey Zhukov, president of the Moscow Space Club

READ NEXT "If we keep on doing things the way we do, we'll never build the
 new ship," Sergei Krikalyov, a veteran cosmonaut who oversees
manned programmes after six flights and 803 days in space, told
Russian media in 2014. Even Russia’s undisputed area of expertise,
the launch of commercial satellites, went through a string of
humiliating disasters and damaged the nation’s reputation as a
trusted space postman. Between 1999 and 2015, ten Proton-M
booster rockets crashed or failed to reach orbit, destroying dozens
Forget supersonic, the future of satellites. One of the crashes occurred because an incompetent
of super-fast flight is sub- engineer installed a speed sensor upside down, a government
orbital inspection found in 2015.
By JEREMY WHITE The incompetence problem has loomed large since the post-Soviet
1990s, when underpaid space developers switched to more earthly
and profitable jobs. As a result, the industry currently employs
grey-haired veterans and inexperienced newcomers. “What is left
is the elderly generation and green youngsters,” says Sergey
Zhukov, president of the Moscow Space Club.
Each Proton-M crash caused a minor environmental disaster,
because the rockets run on heptyl, an extremely toxic and
carcinogenic propellant that poisoned dozens of acres of steppe –
but, luckily, never killed or injured any humans.
Angara, a powerful booster rocket designed to replace Proton-M
and which cost billions of dollars to develop, has launched only
twice, and just once into orbit – in December 2014. The rocket was
designed to be made exclusively in Russia, while the Proton-M
relies heavily on spare parts made in Ukraine. After Crimea’s
annexation, Ukraine severed economic ties with Russia, causing
further technological problems. Future Angara missions will be
launched from Plesetsk, a minor, mostly military spaceport in
northwestern Russia – and from a brand new Siberian
cosmodrome.
In 2010, Putin hailed the construction of the Vostochny (“Eastern”)
cosmodrome as “one of modern Russia’s biggest and most
ambitious projects” that would boost the development of
depopulated, economically stagnant provinces in the country’s
east. Hidden in the sparsely-populated Siberian taiga, some
7,600km east of Moscow and close to the Chinese border,
Vostochny sprawls across nearly 600 square-kilometres,
consisting of hundreds of buildings, including radar stations,
hangars and fuel plants.
READ NEXT It also became a symbol of Russia’s cancerous corruption. Unpaid
construction workers held hunger strikes and rallies, and painted
giant cries for help on the roofs of their barracks. Auditors
identified 1,651 labour code violations that prompted 20
investigations into several subcontractors and hundreds of
officials. Almost 200 of them were demoted and reprimanded,
three were sentenced to jail and four more have been arrested.
After three unmanned launches, one of which failed due to a
The epic tale of China's out of software glitch, Vostochny is barely functional. In early September,
this world plan for space officials discovered hollow spaces below one of the launch pads
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that need to be filled with concrete.
By NICOLE KOBIE
The new cosmodrome will arguably be hobbled forever by
logistical and geographical problems. It takes a dozen specifically-
designed railway wagons two weeks to trudge the almost 6,500km
from a plant in the Volga River city of Samara to Vostochny as they
carry a single dismantled Soyuz rocket. In January, Vostochny’s
average temperature is -25°C.
The Soviet space programme was a collective effort of several
ministries and dozens of research facilities that oversaw each
other and provided constant, multi-level quality control. But
today’s Russian space programme is implemented by Roscosmos,
which was established in 2004 as a national space agency but by
2014 had grown into a mammoth state-run monopoly controlling
dozens of subsidiaries and employing tens of thousands of people.
 It has no domestic competitors and is not accountable to anyone
but the Kremlin.

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contractor – which is, in my view, not correct,” Zhukov says. The
head of Roscosmos is Dmitry Rogozin, who led a nationalist party
and served as Russia’s envoy to Nato and deputy prime minister in
charge of defence and arms manufacturing. His hawkish, anti-
Western statements made him a controversial figure, and his
handling of Roscosmos draws controversy. “Rogozin is most likely
to become a gravedigger of [Russia’s] space programme, he is not
capable of solving anything,” the anonymous industry insider says.
“He hopes to boost government funding, but the crisis has been
going on for too long.”
In 2014, the US, Canada and the European Union sanctioned
Rogozin for his role in Crimea’s annexation. Further sanctions
slapped on Russia cripple the space industry on several fronts.
Roscosmos can’t purchase sophisticated Western electronics, and
several launches have already been delayed, insiders say. Some 70
per cent of microchips in Russian-made satellites are imported,
communications official Igor Chursin reportedly admitted in April.
As a result, the space agency struggles to update the satellites for
GLONASS, Russia’s hugely expensive version of GPS, the global
positioning system. Western sanctions also jeopardised Luna-25,
Russia’s first mission to the Moon since 1976, which was originally
supposed to launch in 2014. The mission is designed to find frozen
water on the Moon’s south pole, but has now been delayed until
2021.
“Distrust of Russia and Kremlin’s current political course that
doesn’t see science as priority makes cooperation with the West in
fundamental space research very problematic,” says Luzin. Despite
the misgivings, the US has not been able to cut its ties with
Roscosmos. It has been buying Russian RD-180 engines for the first
stage of Atlas V rockets, the warhorse of the US space program,
since 1997. Nasa will also pay more than $4bn to Roscosmos for the
delivery of US astronauts to the ISS.
Meanwhile, Roscosmos is trying to boost cooperation with China
and India. Beijing’s space programme copycatted Soviet
developments – its Shenzhou spaceship was based on the
blueprints of Soyuz vessels. But experts warn that China’s
approach to cooperation is radically different from that of the
West. “If for the US and Europe, Russia was a hired employee, for
China, Russia is only a source of technologies and experience,” the
insider says. “China won’t be buying engines for 20 years and pay
for them. It will buy one and dismantle it to make a copy.”
In 2016, a Moscow court sentenced Vladimir Lapygin, a 76 year-old
head of a Roscosmos research facility who developed Soviet rocket
boosters and intercontinental ballistic missiles, to seven years in
jail for treason and selling a top-secret algorithm to calculate
hypersonic flights to China. Lapygin claimed his case was
fabricated because he sent a promo version of declassified
software to a Chinese colleague, hoping that Beijing would buy it.
Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group, considers him a
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political prisoner sentenced for something that “never took place”.
Rogozin pledged to rid Roscosmos of “lazy bones and intriguers”
and initiated audits of its subsidiaries that identified violations
and embezzlement worth more than $10bn. In June, the FSB,
Russia’s successor to the KGB, conducted searches of two
Roscosmos subsidiaries as part of an investigation into treason.
The agency checked 12 people in connection with an unsanctioned
“transfer” of data on hypersonic flight research to “foreign
intelligence”, the Kommersant newspaper reported.
Naturally, the witch-hunt causes concern among Roscosmos
staffers. "We have a nuclear mix of problems that hamper work,” a
Roscosmos engineer tells me on condition of anonymity. “I
absolutely don't like what's happening.” In the United States,
meanwhile, Nasa awaits the first test flights of two types of launch
vehicles for human space flight, developed by Boeing and Elon
Musk’s SpaceX. The launches are supposedly due in early 2019. If
they succeed, Roscosmos may well lose Nasa as its most reliable
customer.

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