Abstract
AI has become a hot topic both among the fervent integrators and the terrified apocalyptics; the formers see AI as the ultimate panacea, while the latter look at it as a great danger. In between, there are several organisations and individuals who consider AI to be good for humanity provided it respects certain limits. Collaboration and contributing to international associations and private firms, these people address the problem by trying to mitigate some low-level errors, such as negative biases, or high-level ones, such as problems of accountability and governance. Each of these bodies works towards a goal: reducing, through regulations, standards, advice, assurances, and independent audits. A particular phenomenon has been observed: internationally, ethical principles and approaches to risk reduction are becoming increasingly similar. Based on this assumption, the authors introduce an analogy to understand the ongoing synchronisation effect. Aware that an ultimate alignment will be impossible (due to the tendency to incompleteness of ethical reasoning) and strongly discouraged (due to the tendency of universal systems to flatten the peripheral voices), the authors suggest a theoretical investigation of the phenomenon of synchronisation and invite to feed it practically through the available tools of data governance. They show how ethics-based audits can be a suitable tool for the task through the presentation of a case study.
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Notes
The acronyms AI is familiar enough to be used without explaining that it refers to artificial intelligence.
European Union, Council of Europe, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, UK Information Commissioner’s Office.
International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
European Committee for Standardization/European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (the original acronyms derive from the French version).
Association Française de Normalisation, British Standards Institution, Ente Nazionale Italiano di Unificazione.
Information Systems Audit and Control Association, Responsible AI Institute, Global Digital Foundation.
The Assessment List on Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, EU High Level Expert Group.
A statistical analysis for bias remediation created by O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing.
Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law Impact Assessment for AI created by the Conseil of Europe (CAHAI–Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence).
According to YouTube, the five most viewed videos on the subject have totalled more than 30 million views.
A Māori term for a New Zealander of European descent–probably originally applied to English-speaking Europeans living in Aotearoa, New Zealand (Te Aka) (te Aka Māori Dictionary Project, 2009).
If agent A knows that P or Q and agent B knows that not P, then a supra-agent C will know that P.
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Light, R., Panai, E. The Self-Synchronisation of AI Ethical Principles. DISO 1, 24 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44206-022-00023-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44206-022-00023-1