Type 1: Diffusion of responsibility

Example: "Scientists develop an algorithm for predicting the answers to questions about a person, as a function of freely available and purchasable information about the person (social media, resumes, browsing history, purchasing history, etc.). The algorithm is made freely available to the public, and employers begin using the algorithm to screen out potential hires by asking, “Is this person likely to be arrested in the next year?” Courts and regulatory bodies attempt to ban the technology by evoking privacy norms, but struggle to establish cases against the use of publicly available information, so the technology broadly remains in use. Innocent people who share certain characteristics with past convicted criminals end up struggling to get jobs, become disproportionately unemployed, and correspondingly more often commit theft to fulfill basic needs. Meanwhile, police also use the algorithm to prioritize their investigations, and since unemployment is a predictor of property crime, the algorithm leads them to suspect and arrest more unemployed people. Some of the arrests are talked about on social media, so the algorithm learns that the arrested individuals are likely to be arrested again, making it even more difficult for them to get jobs. A cycle of deeply unfair socioeconomic discrimination begins."(p. 4)

"Could humanity create an “AI industry” that becomes sufficiently independent of us to pose a global threat? It might seem strange to consider something as abstract or diffuse as an industry posing a threat to the world. However, consider how the fossil fuel industry was built by humans, yet is presently very difficult to shut down or even regulate, due to patterns of regulatory interference exhibited by oil companies in many jurisdictions (Carpenter and Moss, 2013; Dal Bó, 2006). The same could be said for the tobacco industry for many years (Gilmore et al., 2019). The “AI industry”, if unchecked, could behave similarly, but potentially much more quickly than the oil industry, in cases where AI is able to think and act much more quickly than humans."(p. 4)

"If humanity comes to depend critically on AI technology to survive, it may not be so easy to do away with even if it begins to harm us, individually or collectively...consider how species of ants who feed on acacia trees eventually lose the ability to digest other foods, ending up “enslaved” to protecting the health of the acacia trees as their only food source (Ed Yong, 2013). "(p. 4)