The strong increase in the development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems has led to growing concerns about the ethical aspects of these systems. As a result, a proliferation of high-level ethical principles for AI has emerged. But, as it turns out, these principles are very difficult to bring into practice: principles may place conflicting demands on AI design or are hard to formalize in a univocal way.
We will discuss these hard questions of operationalizing AI ethics via thought-provoking questions and dilemmas for the audience to consider. And we will look at the preliminary results from the Moral AI-Gency project: an initiative supported by the SIDN Fonds, Erasmus University Rotterdam and de Volksbank to provide research driven answers on how we can balance AI’s unique potential for problem solving with the serious ethical risks of discrimination, lack of transparency and the diffusion of responsibility.
We welcome participants who are interested in continuing the discussion after the session. Furthermore, the project is very much oriented on Dutch organizations and European perspectives. Any international contributions would expand the scope of the project and would provide valuable input for generalizing the results of the research and the scope of the ethical framework. If audience members are interested we can organize these discussions on a separate platform or in more informal face-to-face video calls.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:Ethics is a topic that everyone has intuitions on. Therefore, for the discussion the number of people present doesn’t have to impede the discussions on the values we think are important in AI systems and especially how we want to see these values operationalized. Via interactive tools such as Mentimeter, the positions of the audience on several ethical questions can be explored and discussed. And even with 1 person in the room these discussion can prove to be valuable.
Works as an Ethics & AI specialist at the Dutch bank de Volksbank while also holding a Ph.D. position at the Erasmus University Rotterdam on the topic of AI Ethics.