Ethics and AI | Part 1

Technology and regulation: catch me if you can!

Context

While ethics in relation to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the concern of almost everyone, the easiest answer to the question „who is in charge?” is „the industry”. To the extent that emerging technologies are new, that is they represent innovation, they are already flying above existing laws, rules, and regulations, which are inherently “old”. Innovation in technology is a continuum of spontaneous and unpredictable moves. Each technological advance leads to a new process of dissemination, use, and experimentation, which leads to another advance. 

The logic of innovation is not substantially altered by ethical, moral, equity, and other societal considerations. Although innovations in technology claim to bring more efficiency, comfort, and speed, for the consumers, their ultimate goal is to return the investment, to increase profits, to expand into new or larger markets, etc. The governments and other regulators will inevitably be behind the fait accompli by the technology. 

The new technologies will always embed the risk of bad use. The champions of the new technologies will constantly promise and put forward the intention to serve the public good. The risks and possible abuses will be kept in the shade, but they soon materialise in the actual use, when it is more difficult to prevent negative consequences. The process of a social reflection and subsequent norm setting takes time and requires the involvement of many stakeholders, political, social, and economic correlations. It is a race between an elephant and a gazelle. 

In many cases related to digital technologies, the governments are usually left with one dilemma only: the need for new and specific norms or the proper adjustment and application of the existing rules. The answers to this dilemma are already given. The first is that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online. The second is that what is illegal offline should also be illegal online. However, the above conclusions should not be taken in the absolute. Caution is needed, and each new technology should be examined on its own merits and perils, even if some conclusions will be repetitive. Starting with the old maxim of Plato: “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.” If categorising people in good and bad is difficult enough, doing the same with technology is almost impossible. Industry always pretends that their technology is good. Technology seems to enjoy the presumption of innocence at its birth. 

The way we see the AI is faced with the same problems and dilemmas. Ethics goes beyond law. The advent of AI is spectacular and has a powerful impact on the way people think about their future. Yet, its progress does not come with a revolution in the way the governments alone or in a multilateral cooperation setting will react. What is certain is that the issue is on the global agenda and there is work done or undergoing. Ethics is probably one of the most important aspects to be examined.

Drawing the border between ethical and non-ethical use is more difficult than making the difference between legal and illegal.

Once brought to commercial existence, the digital technologies raise multiple safety and security issues, which could have been anticipated but which the producers and society at large ignore at the early stage of their emergence. The fact is that technology outstrips the capacity of rapid reaction of society, at the national or international level. When they are faced with reality, it is often too late for the regulators to envisage preventive safeguards, and therefore damage containment is the only option left. Or, worse, there is no consensus on who should write rules and regulations to mitigate those concerns. This problem is painstaking when it is about regulations that should be elaborated at the international level. For example, it took the United Nations system twenty-one years¹ to draft and adopt a Convention on Cybercrime, although the cybersecurity issues are almost by definition global issues.²

There is no doubt that innovations, AI included, come with a pledge of comfort and convenience, which will be brought under the spotlight by their evangelists. Digital technologies have proved to have dark sides, which have shown their ugly faces sooner rather than later. The worldwide web is now the predilect arena to proliferate hate speech, to recruit and create criminal groups, to spread fake news, lies, and propaganda. 

The drones, who were acclaimed as means of providing food to refugee camps or to groups isolated in vulnerable conditions or to send postal parcels in remote areas, are now among the main tools of waging wars. They brought indeed more convenience in killing people and destroying properties, with no concern for the number or the faces of the human victims.

Drawing the border between ethical and non-ethical use is more difficult than making the difference between legal and illegal. Before trying to see what has been done in terms of codification of international soft and hard law, we should first see what kind of ethics we could have in mind when applied to the use of AI systems and only after to identify if there is a difference between ethics in general and ethics that should cover the specificities of AI, whichever they are.

[Part 1 of 6-part series]

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1. The World Summit on the Information Society (Geneva, 2003), in its Plan of Action tasked ITU and other organisations to work on cybersecurity in action line C5, “Building confidence and security in the use of ICTs”.. ↩︎
2. See resolution 79/243 of the General Assembly of the United Nations entitled „Strengthening International Cooperation for Combating Certain Crimes Committed by Means of Information and Communications Technology Systems and for the Sharing of Evidence in Electronic Form of Serious Crimes”. ↩︎

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Dr Petru Dumitriu was a member of the Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) of the UN system and former ambassador of the Council of Europe to the United Nations Office at Geneva. He is the author of the JIU reports on ‘Knowledge Management in the United Nations System’, ‘The United Nations – Private Sector Partnership Arrangements in the Context of the 2030 Agenda’, ‘Strengthening Policy Research Uptake’, “Cloud Computing in the United Nations System”, and “Policies and Platforms in Support of Learning”. He received the Knowledge Management Award in 2017 and the Sustainable Development Award in 2019 for his reports. He is also the author of the Multilateral Diplomacy online course at DiploFoundation.