Opinion | Universities must take ethics seriously – before AI does more damage
The misuse of AI points to the need for universities to redouble their efforts to teach not just knowledge, but also moral character
It has not taken long for universities to discover ways artificial intelligence (AI) is being used for bad ends. Reports tell of university students being duped by scams leveraging new technologies. But students aren’t just being abused by the misuse of these new technologies. Some are using AI to abuse others.
Technology, including AI, is not in itself ethical. Neither is intelligence. Intelligence can’t cancel out immorality, but it might make a “more clever devil” – to use an oft-quoted phrase. Intelligence and mastery of technology are better described as competencies – our abilities to do things, and do them well, for good or ill.
In Asia, there was classically no division between competence and character. In the Analects, Confucius mourned the acquisition of knowledge and skill without the accompaniment of virtue. As translated by D.C. Lau, he said: “It is these things that cause me concern: failure to cultivate virtue, failure to go more deeply into what I have learned, inability, when I am told what is right, to move to where it is, and inability to reform myself when I have defects.”