Student attitudes towards ethics and AI in Japan (new paper)

Published with AI & Society, Nader Ghotbi, Peter Mantello and Tung Manh Ho examined the attitude and moral perception of 228 college students (63 Japanese and 165 non-Japanese) towards artificial intelligence (AI) in an international university in Japan. Paper here.

The students were asked to select a single most significant ethical issue associated with AI in the future from a list of nine ethical issues suggested by the World Economic Forum, and to explain why they believed that their chosen issues were most important. The majority of students (n=149, 65%) chose unemployment as the major ethical issue related to AI. The second largest group of students (n=29, 13%) were concerned with ethical issues related to emotional AI, including the impact of AI on human behaviour and emotion. The paper discusses the results in detail and concludes that, while policymakers must consider how to ameliorate the impact of AI on employment, AI engineers need to consider the emotional aspects of AI in research and development, as well.