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Moral Awareness of College Students Regarding Artificial Intelligence

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Abstract

To evaluate the moral awareness of college students regarding artificial intelligence (AI) systems, we have examined 467 surveys collected from 152 Japanese and 315 non-Japanese students in an international university in Japan. The students were asked to choose a most significant moral problem of AI applications in the future from a list of ten ethical issues and to write an essay about it. The results show that most of the students (n = 269, 58%) considered unemployment to be the major ethical issue related to AI. The second largest group of students (n = 54, 12%) was concerned with ethical issues related to emotional AI, including the impact of AI on human behavior and emotion and robots’ rights and emotions. A relatively small number of students referred to the risk of social control by AI (6%), AI discrimination (6%), increasing inequality (5%), loss of privacy (4%), AI mistakes (3%), malicious AI (3%), and AI security breaches (3%). Calculation of the z score for two population proportions shows that Japanese students were much less concerned about AI control of society (− 3.1276, p < 0.01) than non-Japanese students, but more concerned about discrimination (2.2757, p < 0.05). Female students were less concerned about unemployment (− 2.6108, p < 0.01) than males, but more concerned about discrimination (2.4333, p < 0.05). The study concludes that the moral awareness of college students regarding AI technologies is quite limited and recommends including the ethics of AI in the curriculum.

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Funding

This study received support from “Emotional AI in Cities: Cross Cultural Lessons from UK and Japan on Designing for an Ethical Life” funded by JST-UKRI Joint Call on Artificial Intelligence and Society (2019).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Oita, Beppu, Japan

    Nader Ghotbi & Manh Tung Ho

  2. Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Research, Phenikaa University, Yen Nghia, Ha Dong, Hanoi, Vietnam

    Manh Tung Ho

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  1. Nader Ghotbi
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  2. Manh Tung Ho
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Correspondence to Nader Ghotbi.

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Ghotbi, N., Ho, M.T. Moral Awareness of College Students Regarding Artificial Intelligence. ABR 13, 421–433 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41649-021-00182-2

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