You cannot have AI ethics without ethics
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OPINION PAPER
You cannot have AI ethics without ethics Dave Lauer1 Received: 2 September 2020 / Revised: 2 September 2020 / Accepted: 4 September 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
1 Introduction
2 Artificial integrity
Artificial intelligence has emerged as the preeminent technology of the twenty-first century, infiltrating nearly every industry and impacting our lives in obvious, but also increasingly subtle ways. Each industry and company is grappling with how to leverage this new technology to optimize or personalize their products or offerings, understand their business or clients better, or to unlock new sources of revenue and opportunity. In the midst of this innovation, the concept of AI ethics is often overlooked, paid lip service, or simply ignores the idea that you cannot have AI ethics in isolation from a broader and all-encompassing ethical approach. Industries are experimenting with AI in a very difficult environment. Widespread adoption of AI is a relatively new phenomenon. Outside a small circle of math experts, the nuances of different approaches and techniques are not well understood. Even the curricula for data science degrees and certificates are primarily focused on the application of these techniques, rather than the math that underpins such models. For most executives, and especially for legal and compliance professionals, AI remains a black box. In this paper, I will examine the reasons that ethical deployment of AI has been so elusive for so many high-profile organizations, and I’ll explain why there have been such egregious examples of unethical AI built and deployed into the world. I will draw on examples and lessons from other fields, such as medical ethics and systems theory, to demonstrate that AI ethics simply cannot exist without a broader culture of ethics. I will make the case that only organizations with a firm grounding in ethics, and an appreciation for the way complex systems behave can succeed at ethical deployment of AI.
Most AI projects fail to get out of the research lab, but many that do are soon embroiled in scandal. Let us start with a recent example, a new service called Genderify. Genderify set out to identify someone’s gender based on their name, email address or username. In hindsight, this service was probably a terrible idea to begin with in light of the current cultural discourse on gender and identity. Surprising few people other than the founders, Genderify made predictions like “Meghan Smith” was 60% likely to be female, but “Dr. Meghan Smith” was 76% likely to be male. Needless to say, they shut down their service completely within hours of launching. It would be easy to attribute such a failure to a lack of AI ethics, or a lack of an appropriate ethical AI framework on Genderify’s behalf. But was AI ethics the failure here? What would the ethics of AI have told the principals of Genderify that any straightforward ethical framework wouldn’t have? Can any framework take a fundamentally unethical objective, and somehow make it ethical? Of course, t
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