MIT AI Risk Repository
Browse AI risks
24 risk entries extracted from 74 frameworks, coded by domain, subdomain, causal entity, intent and timing. Filter, then export the current selection with its licence and citation attached.
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09.02.01 · Risk Sub-Category
Domain-specific AI - Effects on humans and other living beings: Non-existential risks
Privacy
"Face recognition technologies and their ilk pose significant privacy risks [47]. For example, we must consider certain ethical questions like: what data is stored, for how long, who owns the data that is stored, and can it be subpoenaed in legal cases [42]? We must also consider whether a human will be in the loop when decisions are made which rely on private data, such as in the case of loan decisions [37]."
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"AI machines could be hacked and misused, e.g. manipulating an airport luggage screening system to smuggle weapons"
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09.02.02 · Risk Sub-Category
Domain-specific AI - Effects on humans and other living beings: Non-existential risks
Human dignity/respect
"Discrepancies between caste/status based on intelligence may lead to undignified parts of the society—e.g., humans—who are surpassed in intelligence by AI"
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09.02.06 · Risk Sub-Category
Domain-specific AI - Effects on humans and other living beings: Non-existential risks
Inequality of wealth
"Because a single human actor controlling an artificially intelligent agent will be able to harness greater power than a single human actor, this may create inequalities of wealth"
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09.03.01 · Risk Sub-Category
AGI - Effects on humans and other living beings: Existential risks
Direct competition with humans
"One or more artificial agent(s) could have the capacity to directly outcompete humans, for example through capacity to perform work faster, better adaptation to change, vaster knowledge base to draw from, etc. This may result in human labor becoming more expensive or less effective than artificial labor, leading to redundancies or extinction of the human labor force."
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"AI agents may compete against humans for jobs, though history shows that when a technology replaces a human job, it creates new jobs that need more skills."
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"When considering legal frameworks, we note that at present no such framework has been identified in literature which would apply blame and responsibility to an autonomous agent for its actions. (Though we do suggest that the recent establishment of laws regarding autonomous vehicles may provide some early frameworks that can be evaluated for efficacy and gaps in future research.) Frequently the literature refers to existing liability and negligence laws which might apply to the manufacturer or operator of a device."
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"Liability and negligence are legal gray areas in artificial intelligence. If you leave your children in the care of a robotic nanny, and it malfunctions, are you liable or is the manufacturer [45]? We see here a legal gray area which can be further clarified through legislation at the national and international levels; for example, if by making the manufacturer responsible for defects in operation, this may provide an incentive for manufactures to take safety engineering and machine ethics into consideration, whereas a failure to legislate in this area may result in negligentlydeveloped AI sy
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09.02.07 · Risk Sub-Category
Domain-specific AI - Effects on humans and other living beings: Non-existential risks
Societal manipulation
"A sufficiently intelligent AI could possess the ability to subtly influence societal behaviors through a sophisticated understanding of human nature"
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09.03.02 · Risk Sub-Category
AGI - Effects on humans and other living beings: Existential risks
Unpredictable outcomes
"Our culture, lifestyle, and even probability of survival may change drastically. Because the intentions programmed into an artificial agent cannot be guaranteed to lead to a positive outcome, Machine Ethics becomes a topic that may not produce guaranteed results, and Safety Engineering may correspondingly degrade our ability to utilize the technology fully."
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""In order to preserve human property rights and legal rights, certain controls must be put into place. If an artificially intelligent agent is capable of manipulating systems and people, it may also have the capacity to transfer property rights to itself or manipulate the legal system to provide certain legal advantages or statuses to itself""
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09.01.01 · Risk Sub-Category
Domain-specific AI - Effects on humans and other living beings: Existential Risks
Unethical decision making
"If, for example, an agent was programmed to operate war machinery in the service of its country, it would need to make ethical decisions regarding the termination of human life. This capacity to make non-trivial ethical or moral judgments concerning people may pose issues for Human Rights."
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09.02.04 · Risk Sub-Category
Domain-specific AI - Effects on humans and other living beings: Non-existential risks
Safety
"Are AI safe with respect to human life and property? Will their use create unintended or intended safety issues?"
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09.02.05 · Risk Sub-Category
Domain-specific AI - Effects on humans and other living beings: Non-existential risks
Law abiding
"We find literature that proposes [38] that early artificial intelligence should be built to be safe and lawabiding, and that later artificial intelligence (that which surpasses our own intelligence) must then respect the property and personal rights afforded to humans."
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"If we design our machines to match human levels of ethical decision-making, such machines would then proceed to take some immoral actions (since we humans have had occasion to take immoral actions ourselves)."
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09.02.03 · Risk Sub-Category
Domain-specific AI - Effects on humans and other living beings: Non-existential risks
Decision making transparency
"We face significant challenges bringing transparency to artificial network decisionmaking processes. Will we have transparency in AI decision making?"
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"We note literature—which gives us the domain termed Robot Rights—addressing the rights of the AI itself as we develop and implement it. We find arguments against [38] the affordance of rights for artificial agents: that they should be equals in ability but not in rights, that they should be inferior by design and expendable when needed, and that since they can be designed not to feel pain (or anything) they do not have the same rights as humans. On a more theoretical level, we find literature asking more fundamental questions, such as: at what point is a simulation of life (e.g. artificial in
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"The literature suggests that throughout the development of an AI we may go through several generations of agents which do not perform as expected [37] [43]. In this case, such agents may be placed into a suspended state, terminated, or deleted. Further, we could propose scenarios where research funding for a facility running such agents is exhausted, resulting in the inadvertent termination of a project. In these cases, is deletion or termination of AI programs (the moral patient) by a moral agent an act of murder? This, an example of Robot Ethics, raises issues of personhood which parallel r
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09.01.00 · Risk Category
Domain-specific AI - Effects on humans and other living beings: Existential Risks
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09.02.00 · Risk Category
Domain-specific AI - Effects on humans and other living beings: Non-existential risks
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09.05.00 · Risk Category
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09.06.00 · Risk Category
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