Turning Artificial Intelligence Into Ethical Intelligence

Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].

  Artificial Intelligence   Ethics   Innovation   Organizational Culture  

In October 1941, while completing his Master of Arts degree in Chemistry at New York’s Columbia University, a 21-year-old graduate wrote a short story about the perils of mining selenium in the year 2015, on the 800 degrees Fahrenheit surface of the planet Mercury.

Without the life-saving selenium needed to power the Sunside Mining Station’s photocell banks, explorers Powell and Donovan will be slowly broiled to death. So, when robot SPD 13 (aka Speedy) fails to return from a selenium pool mining expedition, his human companions are forced to venture out to discover what has happened to him.

While the author uses his obvious knowledge of chemistry to help solve the protagonists’ life-threatening dilemma (“It's just a case of remembering that oxalic acid on beating decomposes into carbon dioxide, water, and good old carbon monoxide. College chem, you know.”), the robot’s safe return to the mining station is finally accomplished not via chemical calculus but by a syllogistic sleight of hand that tricks the hapless Speedy into saving Powell’s life.

Today, the plot of “Runaround” sounds as clunky as an antiquated robot plodding slowly across the jagged glitter of Mercury’s fictional surface. But the behavioral rules that the 21-year-old Isaac Asimov formulated to regulate SPD 13’s interaction with Powell…

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