Work must be reshaped in the upcoming new era characterized by new challenges and the presence of new technologies and computational tools. Over-automation seems to be the driver of the digitalization process. Substitution is the paradigm leading Artificial Intelligence and robotics development against human cognition. Digital technology should be designed to enhance human skills and make more productive use of human cognition and capacities. Digital technology is characterized also by scalability because of its easy and inexpensive deployment. Thus, automation can lead to the absence of jobs and scalable negative impact in human development and the performance of business. A look at digitalization from the lens of Sustainable Development Goals can tell us how digitalization impact in different sectors and areas considering society as a complex interconnected system. Here, reflections on how AI and Data impact future of work and sustainable development are provided grounded on an ethical core that comprises human-level principles and also systemic principles.
Out of the three major approaches to ethics, virtue ethics is uniquely well suited as a moral guide in the digital age, given the pace of sociotechnical change and the complexity of society. Virtue ethics focuses on the traits, situations and actions of moral agents, rather than on rules (as in deontology) or outcomes (consequentialism). Even as interest in ethics has grown within HCI, there has been little engagement with virtue ethics. To address this lacuna and demonstrate further opportunities for ethical design, this paper provides an overview of virtue ethics for application in HCI. It r…
Mälardalen University（梅拉达伦大学）；University of Gothenburg（哥德堡大学）
Development of the intelligent autonomous robot technology presupposes its anticipated beneficial effect on the individuals and societies. In the case of such disruptive emergent technology, not only questions of how to build, but also why to build and with what consequences are important. The field of ethics of intelligent autonomous robotic cars is a good example of research with actionable practical value, where a variety of stakeholders, including the legal system and other societal and governmental actors, as well as companies and businesses, collaborate bringing about shared view of ethi…
This paper addresses the ways AI ethics research operates on an ideology of ideal theory, in the sense discussed by Mills (2005) and recently applied to AI ethics by Fazelpour \& Lipton (2020). I address the structural and methodological conditions that attract AI ethics researchers to ideal theorizing, and the consequences this approach has for the quality and future of our research community. Finally, I discuss the possibilities for a nonideal future in AI ethics.
We consider two fundamental and related issues currently faced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) development: the lack of ethics and interpretability of AI decisions. Can interpretable AI decisions help to address ethics in AI? Using a randomized study, we experimentally show that the empirical and liberal turn of the production of explanations tends to select AI explanations with a low denunciatory power. Under certain conditions, interpretability tools are therefore not means but, paradoxically, obstacles to the production of ethical AI since they can give the illusion of being sensitive to et…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Numerous toolkits have been developed to support ethical AI development. However, toolkits, like all tools, encode assumptions in their design about what work should be done and how. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative analysis of 27 AI ethics toolkits to critically examine how the work of ethics is imagined and how it is supported by these toolkits. Specifically, we examine the discourses toolkits rely on when talking about ethical issues, who they imagine should do the work of ethics, and how they envision the work practices involved in addressing ethics. Among the toolkits, we identify …
Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；The Hashemite University（哈希姆大学）；Pak-Austria Fachhochschule: Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology（巴基斯坦-奥地利应用科学与技术学院）；Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；Information Technology University（信息技术大学）
As the globally increasing population drives rapid urbanisation in various parts of the world, there is a great need to deliberate on the future of the cities worth living. In particular, as modern smart cities embrace more and more data-driven artificial intelligence services, it is worth remembering that technology can facilitate prosperity, wellbeing, urban livability, or social justice, but only when it has the right analog complements (such as well-thought out policies, mature institutions, responsible governance); and the ultimate objective of these smart cities is to facilitate and enha…
Making conjectures about future consequences of a technology is an exercise in trying to reduce various forms of uncertainty. Both to produce and reason about these conjectures requires understanding their potential limitations. In other words, we need systematic ways of considering uncertainty associated with given conjectures for downstream consequences. In this work, we frame the task of considering future consequences as an anticipatory ethics problem, where the goal is to develop scenarios that reflect plausible outcomes and their ethical implications following a technology's introduction…
The AI Incident Database as an Educational Tool to Raise Awareness of AI Harms: A Classroom Exploration of Efficacy, Limitations, & Future Improvements
Suppose some future technology enables the same consciously experienced human life to be repeated, identically or nearly so, N times, in series or in parallel. Is this roughly N times as valuable as enabling the same life once, because each life has value and values are additive? Or is it of roughly equal value as enabling the life once, because only one life is enabled, albeit in a physically unusual way? Does it matter whether the lives are contemporaneous or successive? We argue that these questions highlight a hitherto neglected facet of population ethics that may become relevant in the no…
We are moving towards a future where Artificial Intelligence (AI) based agents make many decisions on behalf of humans. From healthcare decision making to social media censoring, these agents face problems, and make decisions with ethical and societal implications. Ethical behaviour is a critical characteristic that we would like in a human-centric AI. A common observation in human-centric industries, like the service industry and healthcare, is that their professionals tend to break rules, if necessary, for pro-social reasons. This behaviour among humans is defined as pro-social rule breaking…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Cornell（康奈尔大学）
The use of bots as virtual confederates in online field experiments holds extreme promise as a new methodological tool in computational social science. However, this potential tool comes with inherent ethical challenges. Informed consent can be difficult to obtain in many cases, and the use of confederates necessarily implies the use of deception. In this work we outline a design space for bots as virtual confederates, and we propose a set of guidelines for meeting the status quo for ethical experimentation. We draw upon examples from prior work in the CSCW community and the broader social sci…
Ethics is an ancient matter for human kind, from the origin of civilizations ethics have been related with the most relevant human concerns and determined cultures. Ethics was initially related to religion, politics and philosophy to then be fragmented into specific communities of practice. The undergoing digital revolution enabled by Artificial Intelligence and Data are bringing ethical wicked problems in the social application of these technologies. However, a broader perspective is also necessary. We now face global and highly dynamics challenges that affect groups and individuals, speciall…
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford（牛津大学牛津互联网研究所）；the Alan Turing Institute（阿兰·图灵研究所）
AI Ethics is now a global topic of discussion in academic and policy circles. At least 84 public-private initiatives have produced statements describing high-level principles, values, and other tenets to guide the ethical development, deployment, and governance of AI. According to recent meta-analyses, AI Ethics has seemingly converged on a set of principles that closely resemble the four classic principles of medical ethics. Despite the initial credibility granted to a principled approach to AI Ethics by the connection to principles in medical ethics, there are reasons to be concerned about i…
Universidad de Sevilla（塞维利亚大学）；Institute of Biomedicine of Seville (IBIS)（塞维利亚生物医学研究所）；Royal Academy of Medicine and Surgery of Seville（塞维利亚皇家医学与外科学院）；Joint Research Center, European Commission（欧盟委员会联合研究中心）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Hospital Universitario “Virgen del Rocio”（“罗西圣母”大学医院）；Center for Advanced Neurology (CNA)（高级神经病学中心）；Hospital Universitario “Virgen Macarena”（“马卡雷纳圣母”大学医院）；Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII)（卡洛斯三世卫生研究所）；College of Medicine, Universidad de Sevilla（塞维利亚大学医学院）；Hospital “VITHAS-NISA Sevilla”（塞维利亚VITHAS-NISA医院）；DINAC Foundation（DINAC基金会）
This paper provides an overview of the current and near-future applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Medicine and Health Care and presents a classification according to their ethical and societal aspects, potential benefits and pitfalls, and issues that can be considered controversial and are not deeply discussed in the literature. This work is based on an analysis of the state of the art of research and technology, including existing software, personal monitoring devices, genetic tests and editing tools, personalized digital models, online platforms, augmented reality devices, and s…
Facultat de Filosofia, Universitat de Barcelona (UB)（巴塞罗那大学哲学系）
Social robotics development for the practice of care and European prospects to incorporate these AI-based systems in institutional healthcare contexts call for an urgent ethical reflection to (re)configurate our practical life according to human values and rights. Despite the growing attention to the ethical implications of social robotics, the current debate on one of its central branches, social assistive robotics (SAR), rests upon an impoverished ethical approach. This paper presents and examines some tendencies of this prevailing approach, which have been identified as a result of a critic…
The 2nd edition of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute's The State of AI Ethics captures the most relevant developments in the field of AI Ethics since July 2020. This report aims to help anyone, from machine learning experts to human rights activists and policymakers, quickly digest and understand the ever-changing developments in the field. Through research and article summaries, as well as expert commentary, this report distills the research and reporting surrounding various domains related to the ethics of AI, including: AI and society, bias and algorithmic justice, disinformation, humans and…
The AI Robotics Ethics Society (AIRES) is a non-profit organization founded in 2018 by Aaron Hui to promote awareness and the importance of ethical implementation and regulation of AI. AIRES is now an organization with chapters at universities such as UCLA (Los Angeles), USC (University of Southern California), Caltech (California Institute of Technology), Stanford University, Cornell University, Brown University, and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). AIRES at PUCRS is the first international chapter of AIRES, and as such, we are committed to promoting and enhan…
I intend to make a scientific contribution of my subjective experience as a single unit of self-described ``artist'' leveraging artificial intelligence as an assistive visual creation tool, in the hopes that it may provide some inspiration or deeper meaning for fellow artists and computer scientists in this medium. First, I will provide some background on my personal history thus far as an artist. Neither artist nor scientist can exist in a vaccuum, so I then will provide some (albeit a non-exhaustive list of) related work that has helped me contextualize my own work and thinking in this area.…
There is a growing movement in undergraduate computer science (CS) programs to embed ethics across CS classes rather than relying solely on standalone ethics courses. One strategy is creating assignments that encourage students to reflect on ethical issues inherent to the code they write. Building off prior work that has surveyed students after doing such assignments in class, we conducted focus groups with students who reviewed a new introductory ethics-based CS assignment. In this experience report, we present a case study describing our process of designing an ethics-based assignment and pr…
Activists, journalists, and scholars have long raised critical questions about the relationship between diversity, representation, and structural exclusions in data-intensive tools and services. We build on work mapping the emergent landscape of corporate AI ethics to center one outcome of these conversations: the incorporation of diversity and inclusion in corporate AI ethics activities. Using interpretive document analysis and analytic tools from the values in design field, we examine how diversity and inclusion work is articulated in public-facing AI ethics documentation produced by three c…
This commentary traces contemporary discourses on the relationship between artificial intelligence and labour and explains why these principles must be comprehensive in their approach to labour and AI. First, the commentary asserts that ethical frameworks in AI alone are not enough to guarantee workers' rights since they lack enforcement mechanisms and the representation of different stakeholders. Secondly, it argues that current discussions on AI and labour focus on the deployment of these technologies in the workplace but ignore the essential role of human labour in their development, partic…
The metaverse is expected to be the next major evolution phase of the internet. The metaverse will have an impact on human society, production, and life. In this work, we analyze the current trends and challenges that building such a virtual environment will face. We focus on three major pillars to guide the development of the metaverse: privacy, governance, and ethical design, to guide the development of the metaverse. Finally, we propose a preliminary modular-based framework for an ethical design of the metaverse.
