Abstract
Autonomy is often considered a core value of Western society that is deeply entrenched in moral, legal, and political practices. The development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems to perform a wide variety of tasks has raised new questions about how AI may affect human autonomy. Numerous guidelines on the responsible development of AI now emphasise the need for human autonomy to be protected. In some cases, this need is linked to the emergence of increasingly ‘autonomous’ AI systems that can perform tasks without human control or supervision. Do such ‘autonomous’ systems pose a risk to our own human autonomy? In this article, I address the question of a trade-off between human autonomy and system ‘autonomy’.
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Notes
- 1.
This is not to claim that machines will never be able to obtain the capacity for autonomy.
- 2.
The relationship between autonomy and informed consent is also frequently discussed in the context of biomedical ethics, e.g. Beauchamp et al. (2001).
- 3.
In a similar vein, Floridi & Cowls (2019) emphasise the importance of humans to be able to freely choose which decisions are delegated to AI systems, as well as to be able to reverse this choice, if needed. The authors call this the ‘decide-to-delegate’ model. Notably, there exists some ambiguity regarding who these ‘humans’ are, that is, whether it refers to any or all humans, users, operators, citizens, etc. Depending on the answer, the ‘deciding-to-delegate’ model will result in radically different demands on system design or governance mechanisms.
- 4.
This has been emphasised many times in the literature on relational autonomy. See e.g. Hutchison et al. (2018) and references therein.
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Prunkl, C. (2022). Is There a Trade-Off Between Human Autonomy and the ‘Autonomy’ of AI Systems?. In: Müller, V.C. (eds) Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence 2021. PTAI 2021. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 63. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09153-7_6
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