“AI Safety” Without Virtue Will Never Be Safe

The solution for all this, we are told, is AI safety, safety, safety. In practice, this means regulations, rules, guidelines, standards, monitoring, policies, watchdogs, etc. And here the Biden administration seems to be ahead of the game: on October 30^th, the President released an Executive Order promising “new standards for AI safety and security.” Philosophers are getting into the game by adding ethics into the discussion, with the result that most philosophy courses on ethics now include discussion of AI and robotics. Yet in all the discussion about AI ethics and safety, you’ll be hard pressed to find much discussion about AI and virtue. Virtue, though enjoying something of a resurgence among contemporary moral philosophers, has for the most part receded from popular vocabulary. For many, the concept of virtue may bring to mind the quaint world of Jane Austen when characters were concerned with preserving or not losing their virtue.