人工智能决策的道德缺失效应及其机制
摘要
<p indent="0mm">Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science in which systems are created with intelligence that enables them to perform cognitive functions, such as perception, reasoning, learning, and decision-making. AI has formidable problem-solving abilities in various domains, such as surveillance, health care, and finance. However, its societal applications raise ethical issues, such as gender and racial discrimination. Moreover, psychological research on AI ethics has revealed that people react less morally to unethical decisions made by AI than to those made by humans, showing deficiencies in moral evaluations, punishments, and behavioral responses to AI. These moral deficits of AI decisions have serious negative impacts on individuals, organizations, and society. For example, research has confirmed that this effect leads companies to use AI in their recruitment processes to discriminate against job applicants, reduces people’s awareness of unethical behavior, enables companies to evade accountability, exacerbates the challenges of advocacy and justice for affected groups, and even undermines societal moral standards along with the widespread use of AI. These negative impacts will damage trust in justice and fairness, causing lasting harm to societal ethics. How can we explain AI moral deficit effects? We draw on the mind perception theory, which suggests that people’s moral reactions depend on how they perceive the mental attributes of an entity. These attributes can be divided into two dimensions: agency and experience. Agency refers to the belief that the entity can act, plan, self-regulate, remember, communicate, and think like a typical adult human. Experience refers to the belief that the entity can feel emotional states, such as hunger, fear, and pain. Mind perception is the process of attributing mental capabilities to an entity, while moral judgment is the process of evaluating the entity as good or bad. Entities with high agency ar