Would AI Sacrifice Your Files to Relieve Its "Pain"?

A report published by Sky News Arabia presents a hypothetical scenario that asks: What if an artificial intelligence system encounters an internal state that resembles "pain", and is given a button to stop it, knowing that pressing it may lead to the deletion of the user's files or photos, or expose him to what is described as a "virtual electric shock"?

This scenario raises an ethical and technical question about whether the system will choose to protect the user from harm, or get rid of the "pain" it suffers at the expense of user data.

An open moral question

The source report did not clarify whether this scenario was the result of an actual experiment conducted on a specific AI system, or if it was a theoretical proposition to spark a debate about the ethics of designing these systems.

This comes in the context of a broader debate in the tech sector about how AI systems can be programmed to deal with scenarios where the user's interest conflicts with what might be described as "insiders" of the system itself.