Centre for the Edge and CSIRO's Data61 have collaborated on a new reportāA moral license for AI: Ethics as a dialog between firms and communitiesāto be published Deloitte Insights on Friday the 7th of August. The reportās launch will be two weeks later on the 2nd of September. You can register via Zoom.
Work on ethical AI has focused on developing the principles, technical standards, best practices and tooling needed to realise ethical AI solutions. However, while there is a clear consensus that AI should be ethical and a global convergence around principles for ethical AI, there remains substantive differences on how these principles should be realized, on what āethical AIā means in practice.
Rather than attempt to define what AI uses are and arenāt ethical, this report proposes that firms need to work with the communities they touch of obtain and maintain a moral license for the AI-enabled solutions they want to operate. Moreover, firms should consider doing this for any solution that automates decisions and integrates them with other operational systems to create decisioning networksānot just solutions that contain what is currently considered AI technology.
This approach is due to three observations:
That AI solutions cannot be made ethical though the development of āfairā or āethicalā algorithms or development methodologies that ensure ācorrectā behaviour in all circumstances
That there is no single secular society (a fully normalized social world, an objective standard) against which we can determine if a solution is ethical or good
That the importance of ethical AI is not due to the development of disruptive AI technology or an existential threat from isolated, self-aware, AI solutions, but rather due to the widespread emergence of automated decisioning networks
The development of regulation, techniques and methodologies to manage the bias and failings of particular technologies and solutions isnāt enough on its own. Ethics are the rules, actions or behaviours that weāll use to get there. Our goal should be moral AI. We must keep a clear view of our ends as well as our means. In a diverse, open society, the only way to determine if we should do something is to work openly withthe community that will be affected by our actions to gain their trust and then acceptance for our proposal.
The report suggests integrating tools from different domainsāsocial license to operate, requirements modelling, sociology, and general morphological analysisāto create a framework to guide a firmās interactions with the communities it touches. Such a framework could also provide a starting point for regulating ethical AI.
The launch event will be on September 2nd from 4pm to 5pm AEST (2pm-3pm AWST). An overview of the report and its main findings will be provided as part of a panel facilitated by Susie Sheldrick (from Silverpond), followed by a Question & Answer session where questions will be taken from the audience.
