The Ethics of AI Ethics: An Evaluation of Guidelines

Abstract

Current advances in research, development and application of artificial intelligence (AI) systems have yielded a far-reaching discourse on AI ethics. In consequence, a number of ethics guidelines have been released in recent years. These guidelines comprise normative principles and recommendations aimed to harness the "disruptive" potentials of new AI technologies. Designed as a comprehensive evaluation, this paper analyzes and compares these guidelines highlighting overlaps but also omissions. As a result, I give a detailed overview of the field of AI ethics. Finally, I also examine to what extent the respective ethical principles and values are implemented in the practice of research, development and application of AI systems -and how the effectiveness in the demands of AI ethics can be improved.

Artificial Intelligence, Governance and Ethics: Global Perspectives

“…Likewise, causal mechanisms and functions of certain technologies can be investigated using a more static analysis (Rahwan et al 2019). Typical topics are self-driving cars, political manipulation by AI applications, autonomous weapon systems, facial recognition, algorithmic discrimination, conversational bots, social sorting by ranking algorithms, and many more (Hagendorff 2019).…”

“…In many of the AI ethics/governance statements, we see similar if not the same concept reappear, such as transparency explainability, accountability etc. Hagendorff (2019) has pointed out that these principles, frequently encountered, are often 'the most easily operationalized mathematically' which may account partly for their presence in many initiatives.…”

“…To what extent are participants in AI and its governance and ethics debates and initiatives demographically representative of the population at large? Hagendorff (2019) has criticised a lack of gender diversity in the AI field as an example of how ethical goals are being 'underachieved'.…”

“…Is reference made to other government or corporate initiatives which may contradict the principles? To what extent are the 'hidden costs' of AI made visible and internalised, such as the energy and other human resources and raw materials needed for the systems(Hagendorff 2019)? The language of sustainability in the EU High-Level Expert Panel's Recommendations does acknowledge the environmental and sustainability aspects and concerns regarding the creation and use of AI technologies.…”

Ethics of Food Recommender Applications

“…In order to analyse these white papers and guidelines, several surveys and works in the literature aim to provide a broad overview of these various undertakings [18,24]. Despite these efforts, the difficulty to evaluate and compare these guidelines lies mainly in the arXiv:2002.05679v1 [cs.CY] 3 Feb 2020 Figure 1: The different levels of ethical guidelines & the matching AI context for food recommender systems lack of clarity regarding the highly abstract and vague principles in these texts, which are in most cases not even close to the precision that would allow a more formal comparison and exploration of these architectures.…”