Can ethical values of Ubuntu be embedded in AI?

Abstract

What began as tool making many millennia ago has evolved into artificial intelligence (AI) in the modern day era. Very few aspects of our daily lives are left unaffected by this technological transformation so much we can hardly remember how to commute or how to communicate without it. Our globe has shrunk into a global village within a generation. This growth in AI development has been so rapid since the turn of the century that the idea of the technology reaching human-level intelligence is no longer a far-fetched one. As the machines get increasingly better at carrying out tasks which previously could only be performed by human beings, our reliance on them keeps growing. More advancements in AI inevitably lead to greater responsibilities being relegated to machines, giving rise to important ethical questions about what sort of moral values are promoted or diminished in society as a direct consequence of AI. My thesis proposes that, like the good tool makers we have become, we must embed our values of Ubuntu into AI and render it permanently predictable as tending towards respectfulness for life and consideration for the environment. AI design teams assembled in the letsema fashion can draw from diverse skills-sets to realise this goal.