Ethics by Design

Abstract

Ethics by Design concerns the methods, algorithms and tools needed to endow autonomous agents with the capability to reason about the ethical aspects of their decisions, and the methods, tools and formalisms to guarantee that an agent's behavior remains within given moral bounds. In this context some questions arise: How and to what extent can agents understand the social reality in which they operate, and the other intelligences (AI, animals and humans) with which they co-exist? What are the ethical concerns in the emerging new forms of society, and how do we ensure the human dimension is upheld in interactions and decisions by autonomous * Corresponding author.Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored.

Missing the missing values: The ugly duckling of fairness in machine learning

“…Because of the ubiquitous use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) for decision making, there is an increasing urge in ensuring that these algorithmic decisions are fair, that is, they do not discriminate some groups over others, especially with groups that are defined over protected attributes, such as gender, race and nationality 1–7 . Despite all this growing research interest, fairness in decision making did not arise as a consequence of the use of machine‐learning and other predictive models in data science and AI 8,9 . Fairness is an old and fundamental concept when dealing with data that should cover all data processing activities, from data gathering to data cleansing, through modelling and model deployment.…”

The ethics of algorithms: key problems and solutions

“…For example, Ananny and Crawford argue that, at least, providers of algorithms ought to facilitate public discourse about their technology (Ananny and Crawford 2018). Similarly, to address the issue of ad hoc ethical actions, some have claimed that accountability should first and foremost be addressed as a matter of convention (Dignum et al 2018;Reddy et al 2019).…”

“…In the same vein, Binns (2018) focuses on the politicalphilosophical concept of "public reason". Considering that the processes for ascribing responsibility for the actions of an algorithm differ, both in nature and scope, in the public versus private sector, Binns calls for the establishment of a publicly shared framework (Binns 2018; see also Dignum et al 2018), according to which algorithmic decisions should be able to withstand the same level of public scrutiny that human decision-making would receive. This approach has been echoed by many others in the reviewed literature (Ananny and Crawford 2018;Blacklaws 2018;Buhmann et al 2019).…”

Community-in-the-loop: towards pluralistic value creation in AI, or—why AI needs business ethics

“…The ethical relevance of business practices and the wider societal context shows that a focus on "better building" [8] is insufficient as ethical implications go beyond an ethical design of AI as a technical system and AI ethics cannot be "solved" but should rather accompany the use of AI continuously [7,65]. In this light, approaches to "ethics by design" [79][80][81] may reveal similar limitations insofar as they are based on the assumption that ethical questions can be dealt with exclusively or predominantly at the level of the design of a system. The implicit assumption of moral causation in the sense that poor ethics on the part of the responsible developers are the source of bad designs which in turn produce harmful outcomes [8] reflects at least a limited understanding, in the worst case, it indicates more fundamental normative shortcomings.…”