From computer ethics and the ethics of AI towards an ethics of digital ecosystems (original) (raw)
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping our world. As AI systems become increasingly autonomous and integrated into various sectors, fundamental ethical issues such as accountability, transparency, bias, and privacy are exacerbated or morph into new forms. This introduction provides an overview of the current ethical landscape of AI. It explores the pressing need to address biases in AI systems, protect individual privacy, ensure transparency and accountability, and manage the broader societal impacts of AI on labour markets, education, and social interactions. It also highlights the global nature of AI's challenges, such as its environmental impact and security risks, stressing the importance of international collaboration and culturally sensitive ethical guidelines. It then outlines three unprecedented challenges AI poses to copyright and intellectual property rights; individual autonomy through AI's "hypersuasion"; and our understanding of authenticity, originality, and creativity through the transformative impact of AI-generated content. The conclusion emphasises the importance of ongoing critical vigilance, imaginative conceptual design, and collaborative efforts between diverse stakeholders to deal with the ethical complexities of AI and shape a sustainable and socially preferable future. It underscores the crucial role of philosophy in identifying and analysing the most significant problems and designing convincing and feasible solutions, calling for a new, engaged, and constructive approach to philosophical inquiry in the digital age.
Ethical framework for Artificial Intelligence and Digital technologies
International Journal of Information Management, 2022
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Digital technologies (DT) is proliferating a profound socio-technical transformation. Governments and AI scholarship have endorsed key AI principles but lack direction at the implementation level. Through a systematic literature review of 59 papers, this paper contributes to the critical debate on the ethical use of AI in DTs beyond high-level AI principles. To our knowledge, this is the first paper that identifies 14 digital ethics implications for the use of AI in seven DT archetypes using a novel ontological framework (physical, cognitive, information, and governance). The paper presents key findings of the review and a conceptual model with twelve propositions highlighting the impact of digital ethics implications on societal impact, as moderated by DT archetypes and mediated by organisational impact. The implications of intelligibility, accountability, fairness, and autonomy (under the cognitive domain), and privacy (under the information domain) are the most widely discussed in our sample. Furthermore, ethical implications related to the governance domain are shown to be generally applicable for most DT archetypes. Implications under the physical domain are less prominent when it comes to AI diffusion with one exception (safety). The key findings and resulting conceptual model have academic and professional implications.
Beyond Technology: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
2020
Consideration of the intersection of human and technology issues and the influences of each of these is the key issue discussed in this paper. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have provided many situations to contemplate with the numerous impacts on society both positive and negative. These new and innovative functions will bring with them additional questions and many overt and covert ethical considerations. Along with the rise of big data, many believe that we have exceeded our worst fears about giving over control and manipulation of our private information. This leads us to the question whether technologies are empowering us or subjecting us. Technologies are becoming more and more capable of performing tasks previously assigned to humans. In many cases, this is a good thing to eliminate routine human tasks. Even in the preliminary phases of understanding AI, there is an infinite amount of questions and concerns. With these concerns, it is imperative that we consider al...
Ethical content in artificial intelligence systems: A demand explained in three critical points
Frontiers in Psychology, 2023
Artificial intelligence (AI) advancements are changing people's lives in ways never imagined before. We argue that ethics used to be put in perspective by seeing technology as an instrument during the first machine age. However, the second machine age is already a reality, and the changes brought by AI are reshaping how people interact and flourish. That said, ethics must also be analyzed as a requirement in the content. To expose this argument, we bring three critical points-autonomy, right of explanation, and value alignment-to guide the debate of why ethics must be part of the systems, not just in the principles to guide the users. In the end, our discussion leads to a reflection on the redefinition of AI's moral agency. Our distinguishing argument is that ethical questioning must be solved only after giving AI moral agency, even if not at the same human level. For future research, we suggest appreciating new ways of seeing ethics and finding a place for machines, using the inputs of the models we have been using for centuries but adapting to the new reality of the coexistence of artificial intelligence and humans.
AI Ethics: Chosen Challenges for Contemporary Societies and Technological Policymaking
2023
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly advancing technology that permeates human life at various levels. It evokes hopes for a better, easier, and more exciting life, while also instilling fears about the future without humans. AI has become part of our daily lives, supporting fields such as medicine, customer service, finance, and justice systems; providing entertainment, and driving innovation across diverse fields of knowledge. Some even argue that we have entered the “AI era.” However, AI is not solely a matter of technological progress. We already witness its positive and negative impact on individuals and societies. Hence, it is crucial to examine the primary challenges posed by AI, which is the subject of AI ethics. In this paper, I present the key challenges that emerged in the literature and require ethical reflection. These include the issues of data privacy and security, the problem of AI biases resulting from social, technical, or socio-technical factors, and the challenges associated with using AI for prediction of human behavior (particularly in the context of the justice system). I also discuss existing approaches to AI ethics within the framework of technological regulations and policymaking, presenting concrete ways in which ethics can be implemented in practice. Drawing on the functioning of other scientific and technological fields, such as gene editing, the development of automobile and aviation industries, I highlight the lessons we can learn from how they function to later apply it to how AI is introduced in societies. In the final part of the paper, I analyze two case studies to illustrate the ethical challenges related to recruitment algorithms and risk assessment tools in the criminal justice system. The objective of this work is to contribute to the sustainable development of AI by promoting human-centered, societal, and ethical approaches to its advancement. Such approach seeks to maximize the benefits derived from AI while simultaneously mitigating its diverse negative consequences.
The idea for this handbook arose in late 2017, with the working title Handbook of Ethics of AI in Context. By the time solicitations went out to potential contributors in the summer of 2018, its title had been streamlined to Handbook of Ethics of AI. Its essentially contextual approach, however, remained unchanged: it is a broadly conceived and framed interdisciplinary and international collection, designed to capture and shape much-needed reflection on normative frameworks for the production, application, and use of artificial intelligence in diverse spheres of individual, commercial, social, and public life.
Ethics as attention to context: recommendations for the ethics of artificial intelligence
Open Research Europe, 2021
This article shows that current ethics guidance documents and initiatives for artificial intelligence (AI) tend to be dominated by a principled approach to ethics. Although this brings value to the field, it also entails some risks, especially in relation to the abstraction of this form of ethics that makes it poorly equipped to engage with and address deep socio-political issues and the material impacts of AI. This is particularly problematic considering the risk for AI to further entrench already existing social inequalities and injustices and contribute to environmental damage. To respond to this challenge posed by AI ethics today, this article proposes to complement the existing principled approach with an approach to ethics as attention to context and relations. It does so by drawing from alternative ethical theories to the dominant principled one, especially the ethics of care or other feminist approaches to ethics. Related to this, it encourages the inclusion of social scienc...
Towards Establishing Criteria for the Ethical Analysis of Artificial Intelligence
2020
Ethical reflection on Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a priority. In this article, we propose a methodological model for a comprehensive ethical analysis of some uses of AI, notably as a replacement of human actors in specific activities. We emphasize the need for conceptual clarification of relevant key terms (e.g., intelligence) in order to undertake such reflection. Against that background, we distinguish two levels of ethical analysis, one practical and one theoretical. Focusing on the state of AI at present, we suggest that regardless of the presence of intelligence, the lack of morally relevant features calls for caution when considering the role of AI in some specific human activities.
AI & Society, 2020
Artificial intelligence (AI) plays an important role in current discussions on information and communication technologies (ICT) and new modes of algorithmic governance. It is an unavoidable dimension of what social mediations and modes of reproduction of our information societies will be in the future. While several works in artificial intelligence ethics (AIE) address ethical issues specific to certain areas of expertise, these ethical reflections often remain confined to narrow areas of application, without considering the global ethical issues in which they are embedded. We therefore propose to clarify the main approaches to AIE, their philosophical assumptions and the specific characteristics of each one of them, in order to identify the most promising approach to develop an ethical reflection on the deployment of AI in our societies, which is the one based on information ethics as proposed by Luciano Floridi. We will identify the most important features of that approach in order to highlight areas that need further investigation.
ETHICAL CONCERNS IN THE TECHNOLOGY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: A SOCIOLOGICAL INSIGHT
IJETRM (https://www.ijetrm.com/) , 2023
One of the most revolutionary technologies of the twenty-first century is artificial intelligence (AI), which has great promise for significant advancements in a wide range of industries, including healthcare, education, banking, transportation, and entertainment. As AI systems become more pervasive in our daily lives, it is crucial to take into account the ethical ramifications of this technological revolution. Therefore, this paper explores the multifaceted relationship between AI and ethics. Based on review of literature and secondary data such as reports, this paper offers sociological insight delving into key ethical considerations, challenges, and the measures needed to ensure for the development of socio-ethical AI.