2019: The Year of (Unethical) AI Ethics?

• In Event: Constellation Thinking and AI Ethics

Abstract

Many observers are saying that 2019 will be the year of AI’s ethical turn. And it’s true that “everyone” is talking about AI ethics. The EU’s High-Level Expert group recently released its thoughtful draft of Europe’s ethical guidelines for AI, and publications and conferences on the “ELSE” – ethical, legal, social, and economic – impacts of AI are cropping up left and right. But almost always missing from these proclamations is a crucial aspect of autocritical reflexivity that asks, well, the ethically implicating questions: What is ethics? Who gets to be ethics-makers and ethics-proclaimers? Which principles are conceived as ethical guideposts, and why? In this paper, I consider the congenital binding between the “good” and the “us”, examine how principles such as “fairness” and “privacy” are construed by and for particular actors in particular contexts, and ask whether the formalized inscription of ethical codes might reinforce an unbalanced, undemocratic, and unsolidial order of global technology governance – in short, whether the global move towards AI ethics might betray a fundamentally unethical distribution of governance power.

Author

• Leah Ashe, University of Notre Dame