Blog Entry 10

Ethical Dilemma: Chapter 9 The use of artificial intelligence and expert systems

A couple of years ago Patricia returned to the UK to take up an academic position at a British university. She had been out of the UK for over twenty year working at universities in a number of countries, and had a good professional employment record. She decided to open a bank account with one of the large banks that had a branch on the campus.

She met the bank manager, was given the necessary forms, and duly completed them. A few days later she returned to the bank to open her account. Much to her surprise, she was told that she could only have a cash account, i.e. she would not be given any bank cards, cheque book, or the like, nor could she have any overdraft facility.

Patricia again met with the bank manager as she naturally felt there must have been some misunderstanding. Key points here are that she already had a bank account in the UK since her student days (although this had been largely unused during her year’s way), she owned no money on credit cards or the like, was a UK citizen, and had a good track record with banks overseas. In addition, her salary from the university was to be paid into her account each month.

Despite her explaining these points, the bank manager was adamant that she could only have cash account. When asked to explain this decision, the bank manager indicated that it was not in fact her decision, but a decision made by an expert system. The bank always used this computer technology when making decision about opening accounts for new clients, and in fact the bank manager could not overrule the restrictions that the expert system imposed. In short, the expert system was empowered in the decision-making process. The bank manager went on to explain that the problem was that the expert system had not previously encountered a person with Patricia’s particular background, and the key point to the computer was the extensive years of residency outside the UK.

To what extent do you think it is appropriate to replace the human decision-making process with computer technologies such as expert systems?

During the conversation Patricia asked the bank manager whether she felt that it was appropriate for the expert system to be empowered in this way. The response she obtained was that it was a great idea because computers do not make mistakes. What do you think about this comment? Do computerized system free from mistakes? Should we be educating people to believe that computers are infallible – are computers infallible? What do you think are the ultimate ramifications of believing in infallible computerized systems?

Answer:

I say it is a no! Leaving a huge task in decision making to a bunch of computer is merely an admirable act of the bank manager. By depending on the computer intelligence to replace human participation, it also covers to holds the bigger risk as the activities comes to the future. I may say, that expert system can be nearly 100% perfect for not committing mistakes but the fact is that, it is always a non logical piece of machine that can only run tasks of what they are programmed with, but what about beyond that?

As far as I remembered, systems are gradually leveled on how strong and powerful it is made of, yet still, humans created these systems which are prone to errors and also that even with just this very tiny error that he can made, it may result to system crash and other undesired outcomes as well.

Decision making for me is a matter of believing one to create decisions for them, without this perception, even how perfect your process may be, still it can’t be helped to obtain a hole to destroy all of its content. Machines are made to make the human effort less, not to replace its function as a man. I’m afraid that if the time will come that all the people are manage and being instructed by a system, that would be the time that people doesn’t care to each other and failed to act the word “unity”.