What is Ethical?

We should be cautious about using the terms such as ethical and moral in context of AI. The terms like moral machines are increasingly becoming part of the public discourse. The key differences between moral and computational acts lie in the motivation behind the act, moral agency and moral responsibility. Ethical justifications form the bedrock of legal defences. If we deploy AI in the policy realm it has to be coupled with strict accountability norms and human oversight.

This idea is important because the terms ethical or moral have built in linguistic expectation, which if wrongly used in context of AI can have significant repercussions. AI systems in some sense maybe safer than human systems but whether they are moral needs to be more carefully examined.