AI'S ETHICAL EFFECTS ON BUSINESS

Although artificial intelligence is infiltrating a variety of aspects of the world, we most commonly interact with AI in social media. Be it manipulated political speeches, music, visual art, or simple scams, AI is prevalent in all sorts of social media apps. However, we’ll shift our focus to another sector of artificial intelligence presence: businesses.

As COVID struck, dozens of small businesses took a hit. Unemployment skyrocketed, businesses that required communal human interaction–such as bakeries and coffee shops–immediately lost their consumers, and the list goes on and on. Thousands of businesses are still recovering from the effects of COVID, or rather, they never did. And now, with AI rising, the real question arises: will AI kick these businesses back down, or will it help these businesses thrive?

First, we’ll get into the pros. Mom-and-pop businesses regularly struggle with funding their endeavors due to their small size. As a result, AI can play a unique and beneficial role. Machine learning (ML) could take over marketing and financing, thus reducing the cost of hiring employees for those specific sectors. Similarly, AI could handle designs and graphics, automated digital communication, and more. This allows mom-and-pop businesses to have more profit that they can thus divert to their growth, leveling the competitive field. This outcome, as most would agree, is ethically permissible as it promotes fair competition.

However, if we apply this strategy to a larger business, we would see major cons in AI usage in business atmospheres. In large corporations–which tend to have the funds to pay employees–AI automation of marketing, economics, design, coding (the list goes on) could result in mass unemployment for thousands of people. The presence of AI in this scenario would still save money, but would lead to a much larger scale of unemployment than the small business scenario. In this application, the harms outweigh the benefits. While efficiency may increase, thousands of individuals would lose jobs.

However, it is important to note that certain ethical viewpoints would take the opposite belief than what I have stated above. Some ethical viewpoints would argue that any human unemployment, even at the small scale of mom-and-pop businesses, would be unethical even if the trade-off leads to a larger scale of success of the small business. However, other ethical advocates would argue that company success is what should be prioritized the most in today’s free-market society, such as the shareholder primacy theory, which would green light the release of hundreds to increase company profits and thus increase shareholder profits.

The truth is, AI in businesses is a complex and extremely debatable topic. Concern arises as AI also begins to infiltrate fields such as healthcare, where lives are constantly at risk. It truly is up to every person’s personal philosophy to determine their viewpoint on this issue. However, that doesn’t change the fact that as AI usage increases in America–a country with little to no AI regulations–unemployment rates are bound to spike unless policies are enacted.