Cultural Differences as Excuses? Human Rights and Cultural Values in Global Ethics and Governance of AI
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Cultural Differences as Excuses? Human Rights and Cultural Values in Global Ethics and Governance of AI Pak-Hang Wong 1 Received: 10 June 2020 / Accepted: 22 June 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Cultural differences pose a serious challenge to the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence (AI) from a global perspective. Cultural differences may enable malignant actors to disregard the demand of important ethical values or even to justify the violation of them through deference to the local culture, either by affirming the local culture lacks specific ethical values, e.g., privacy, or by asserting the local culture upholds conflicting values, e.g., state intervention is good. One response to this challenge is the human rights approach to AI governance, which is intended to be a universal and globally enforceable framework. The proponents of the approach, however, have so far neglected the challenge from cultural differences or left out the implications of cultural diversity in their works. This is surprising because human rights theorists have long recognized the significance of cultural pluralism for human rights. Accordingly, the approach may not be straightforwardly applicable in “non-Western” contexts because of cultural differences, and it may also be critiqued as philosophically incomplete insofar as the approach does not account for the (non-) role of culture. This commentary examines the human rights approach to AI governance with an emphasis on cultural values and the role of culture. Particularly, I show that the consideration of cultural values is essential to the human rights approach for both philosophical and instrumental reasons. Keywords Cultural diversity . Ethical pluralism . Human rights . Human dignity . Universal
human interests . AI governance
* Pak-Hang Wong [email protected]–hamburg.de
1
Department of Informatics, Universität Hamburg, Vogt-Kölln-Straße 30, 22527 Hamburg, Germany
P.-H. Wong
1 Introduction In 2010, the Indian government stated that “India is not a particularly private nation. Personal information is often shared freely and without thinking twice. Public life is organized without much thought to safeguarding personal data” (quoted in Marda and Acharya 2014). The statement suggests that privacy is a foreign idea and being imported into India at most for instrumental purposes. In a similar vein, Bing Song (2018) has defended state intervention into private lives through China’s social credit system by noting that “there are different cultural expectations of the government in China than in other countries. China’s governance tradition of promoting good moral behavior goes back thousands of years.” The Chinese view is in marked contrast to the liberal view in which the value of individual autonomy significantly limits state intervention (see, e.g., Mill 1978). The Supreme Court of India has subsequently ruled that privacy is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Indian constitution (Panday 2017). Also, the Chinese government has since explicitly ca
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