On the Efficiency of Ethics as a Governing Tool for Artificial Intelligence

The 4th Industrial Revolution is the culmination of the digital age. Nowadays, technologies such as robotics, nanotechnology, genetics, and artificial intelligence promise to transform our world and the way we live. Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Safety is an emerging research field that has been gaining popularity in recent years. Several private, public and non-governmental organizations have published guidelines proposing ethical principles for regulating the use and development of autonomous intelligent systems. Meta-analyses of the AI Ethics research field point to convergence on certain principles that supposedly govern the AI industry. However, little is known about the effectiveness of this form of Ethics. In this paper, we would like to conduct a critical analysis of the current state of AI Ethics and suggest that this form of governance based on principled ethical guidelines is not sufficient to norm the AI industry and its developers. We believe that drastic changes are necessary, both in the training processes of professionals in the fields related to the development of software and intelligent systems and in the increased regulation of these professionals and their industry. To this end, we suggest that law should benefit from recent contributions from bioethics, to make the contributions of AI ethics to governance explicit in legal terms.

Worldwide AI Ethics: a review of 200 guidelines and recommendations for AI governance

In the last decade, a great number of organizations have produced documents intended to standardize, in the normative sense, and promote guidance to our recent and rapid AI development. However, the full content and divergence of ideas presented in these documents have not yet been analyzed, except for a few meta-analyses and critical reviews of the field. In this work, we seek to expand on the work done by past researchers and create a tool for better data visualization of the contents and nature of these documents. We also provide our critical analysis of the results acquired by the application of our tool into a sample size of 200 documents.