Will A.I. help or harm animals?

Study: Whether artificial intelligence systems help or harm animals is up to us, but a robust discussion is not taking place.

A new research paper found that the growing field of artificial intelligence (AI) ethics is leaving animals behind. It found that as AI increasingly impacts the quality of our lives — and in the case of animals, their actual lives — it is important to address these issues now before we hand more and more decision-making to AI. 

It found, for example, that even though emerging self-driving technologies have the potential to “substantially reduce animal deaths and injuries on the road… this will not happen unless the designers of these systems choose to make it happen.” The authors found that carmakers have chosen not to do so when it involves small animals, such as cats, raccoons, squirrels, and others, of which upwards of hundreds of millions are killed by cars every year.