I want to take you back to the year 2019, back when I was still in high school, before lockdown, and before ChatGPT. On this inauspicious year as an English project I had to create a multi-genre project on a topic of my choosing. For my topic I decided to talk about the ethics of lethal autonomous weapon systems or in simpler terms the ethics of AI with guns.

In short the project discussed the ethical implications of using lethal autonomous weapon systems, from the ramifications of allowing a computer to decide to kill a human being, to the legal quagmire over who is ultimately responsible for the actions the system would take.

Looking back on it this was my first foray into the realm of ethics and artificial intelligence however shallow it may have been (I was in 11th grade, it wasn’t that big of a project). And while AI has taken a far different form in the public consciousness these questions are still important. Sure right now the most advanced AI we are aware of are glorified chat bots and image generators but the field is ever advancing. We not only have to raise concerns about ethics and the AI of today but also the AI of tomorrow.

One of the points I tried to raise in that project was that while the technology may not yet exist, that it was important to make legislation now so as to deal with any ethical dilemmas before they happened. Well unfortunately for AI in the realm of ChatGPT and Dall-E that time has passed. But that does not mean that we shouldn’t try to do something now. There is a saying, which I’m probably going to butcher, that goes along the lines of, “The best time to take action was yesterday, the second best time is today” and while it sure would’ve been great to have already addressed these problems, now is the second best time.