Applied science offers reliable repeatability, like a cooking recipe refined iteratively over time, or getting your phone settings right. Similarly, computers perform recursively, doing things over and over. Recently, software systems have begun to “learn” from errors, testing hypotheses against data in the cloud, under human direction, and making adjustments. Like making ratatouille over and over until it’s really good.
Since information systems drive repeatability at warp speed, we begin to see apparent “artificial Intelligence” — useful language models like GPT. However, they mimic “cognition” based on information on the web. The technology is neither sentient nor a “singularity.”
Instead it is an enabler and like all tools before, and it will be used for good and ill on a continuum. Science contains no moral dictums (although it does suggest ways to thrive).
Ethics and morals, by contrast, are about people, about relief from inevitable suffering, and getting along with each other. AI’s output simply reflects information from humanity’s output. It has no agency unless so given. Moreover, it’s neither magic nor divine, it has no “person-hood,” and only its human enablers are (vaguely) accountable for its harms, like a drone strike. Similarly, responsibility for agents, bots, systems, AIs, etc. falls to the people and groups that create them.
If you leave your casserole in the oven an extra two minutes this time, maybe it’ll come out fluffier.