Heard a data scientist say AI can't be ethical because it's just math, and I'm stuck on that

I was at a tech meetup in Chicago on Tuesday and this guy from a big analytics firm said AI doesn't have morals because it's just equations crunching numbers. He argued that trying to make it ethical is like asking a calculator to be fair. It hit me that maybe we're putting too much weight on machines to solve human problems we can't even agree on ourselves. But then I thought about hiring tools rejecting folks based on zip codes, and that feels like a real ethics issue. Has anyone else heard this argument and found a way to push back on it?

2 comments

2 Comments

julia_lee1mo agoMost Upvoted

Three weeks ago I watched an HR bot reject a friend's application because his address was in a lower-income part of town, and the company's own engineers admitted the training data just had a bias against that zip code. It's not the calculator being unfair, it's the humans who fed it bad numbers pretending the machine is the problem.

caleb_thomas931mo ago

Asking a calculator to be fair? Man, even my calculator gets confused when I divide by zero.