Abstract
Many popular artificial intelligence (AI) ethics frameworks center the principle of autonomy as necessary in order to mitigate the harms that might result from the use of AI within society. These harms often disproportionately affect the most marginalized within society. In this paper, we argue that the principle of autonomy, as currently formalized in AI ethics, is itself flawed, as it expresses only a mainstream mainly liberal notion of autonomy as rational self-determination, derived from Western traditional philosophy. In particular, we claim that the adherence to such principle, as currently formalized, does not only fail to address many ways in which people’s autonomy can be violated, but also to grasp a broader range of AI-empowered harms profoundly tied to the legacy of colonization, and which particularly affect the already marginalized and most vulnerable on a global scale. To counter such a phenomenon, we advocate for the need of a relational turn in AI ethics, starting from a relational rethinking of the AI ethics principle of autonomy that we propose by drawing on theories on relational autonomy developed both in moral philosophy and Ubuntu ethics.
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Notes
To deepen the ethical mission of the Decolonial AI movement, see its manifesto at https://manyfesto.ai.
This data can be paradoxical if we consider how much such non-Western countries are more populous than Western ones and how they are the most exploited and affected by AI. Mohamed et al. 2020 provide many examples of such exploitation ranging from ghost workers’ labor to beta-testing techniques (p. 668).
Since a detailed survey of the perspectives that will be mentioned is beyond of the scope of our analysis, i.e., to shed light on the richness of Western moral philosophy on autonomy and on diverse accounts developed within Western ethics beyond those offered by the liberal tradition, we focus on representative samples of these accounts. For their in-depth analysis, see Christman and Anderson (2005).
A widespread idea in AI ethics is that individuals’ identity can be expressed in informational terms (“we are our information”) and therefore its protection requires informational privacy, as safeguarding human control over personal data and rational decision-making (Floridi 2011).
In addition, an exclusive focus on competencies is also at odds with recent discoveries in cognitive sciences (see e.g., Thaler and Sunstein 2009; Kahneman 2011; Simon 1991) according to which individuals rarely choose in optimal conditions, and therefore as rational decision-makers, but rather, in conditions of limited cognitive and time resources that lead them to be very often rationally bounded and biased decision-makers.
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Mhlambi, S., Tiribelli, S. Decolonizing AI Ethics: Relational Autonomy as a Means to Counter AI Harms. Topoi 42, 867–880 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09874-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09874-2