On keeping secrets

Hunter, Aaron (Aaron Hunter (Aaron_Hunter)) (author)
(editor)
(translator)

Copyright © 2015, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.

Proceedings of the 2015 Workshops at the Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Austin, USA, 2015. Communication involves transferring information from one agent to another. An intelligent agent, either human or machine, is often able to choose to hide information in order to protect their interests. The notion of information hiding is closely linked to secrecy and dishonesty, but it also plays an important role in domains such as software engineering. In this paper, we consider the ethics of information hiding, particularly with respect to intelligent agents. In other words, we are concerned with situations that involve a human and an intelligent agent with access to different information. Is the intelligent agent justified in preventing a human user from accessing the information that they possess? This is trivially true in the case where access control systems exist. However, we are concerned with the situation where an intelligent agent is able to using a reasoning system to decide not to share information with all humans. On the other hand, we are also concerned with situations where humans hide information from machines. Are we ever under a moral obligation to share information with a computional agent? We argue that questions of this form are increasingly important now, as people are increasingly willing to divulge private information to machines with a great capacity to reason with that information and share it with others.

https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/WS/AAAIW15/paper/view/10076