Digital Policy Salon: Smart Infrastructure Softening the Pandemic's Blow

You collaborate with the Center for the Governance of AI on how to most practically implement ethical aspects into current and future governance solutions. As a philosopher, how do ethics come into play in AI governance? What does this look like in practice?

When people think about ethics or moral philosophy, they usually think of people sitting in an armchair and thinking about what is right or wrong. But the main contribution of ethics or philosophy in AI, I think, is not merely about discussing right and wrong, but about systematically thinking through the arising issues, uncovering hidden assumptions, embedding it into the wider context, and flagging ambiguities or inconsistencies. For example, a large number of ethics guidelines/principles related to AI state that we should have “fair” algorithms, that algorithms shouldn’t negatively impact human autonomy, etcetera. But this is not particularly instructive for those developing the algorithm, because fairness is such an elusive concept. What we consider fair differs from context to context and, almost more importantly, people may disagree about whether an act is fair or not. Luckily, philosophers have thought about these issues for a long time and have developed clear distinctions between different conceptions of fairness. It is only when we make these different conceptions explicit that we can start having a discussion about whether an algorithm is fair or unfair.