[manux]

Here's an analogy: laws vary from country to country, from state to state, city to city.

But we understand the principle of law-making, what laws mean and how they're applied. This is fairly uniform. What really changes from place to place is the content of those laws.

AI ethics and AI safety are attempting to give us a set of "law-making" rules but for AI. We get to decide (democratically ideally), in countries, states, cities, what "ethics" (what laws) we want, but AI Ethics as a field gives us tools to achieve that regardless of what the ethics/laws are.

For example, how do we encode the trolley problem in self-driving cars? We could decide democratically that cars should act and kill 1 instead of 5. Or the opposite. But then how do we translate that into ifs and else? No one really knows how to do that.