New Paper on Ethical Risk for AI

A new paper that builds on the insights we gained from my postdoctoral research on responsiblity and surgical robotics has been published. In (Douglas et al., 2024), my co-authors (Justine Lacey and David Howard) and I present an account of ethical risk for AI. It appears in the journal AI & Ethics and is open access.

I presented a earlier version of this paper at the 2023 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering and Technology held at TUDelft in the Netherlands in April 2023.

References

2024

AI Ethics

Ethical Risk for AI

David M. Douglas, Justine Lacey, and David Howard

AI & Ethics, Sep 2024

Abs PDF Website

The term ’ethical risk’ often appears in discussions about the responsible development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI). However, ethical risk remains inconsistently defined in this context, obscuring what distinguishes it from other forms of risk, such as social, reputational or legal risk, for example. In this paper we present a definition of ethical risk for AI as being any risk associated with an AI that may cause stakeholders to fail one or more of their ethical responsibilities towards other stakeholders. To support our definition, we describe how stakeholders have role responsibilities that follow from their relationship with the AI, and that these responsibilities are towards other stakeholders associated with the AI. We discuss how stakeholders may differ in their ability to make decisions about an AI, their exposure to risk, and whether they or others may benefit from these risks. Stakeholders without the ability to make decisions about the risks associated with an AI and how it is used are dependent on other stakeholders with this ability. This relationship places those who depend on decision-making stakeholders at ethical risk of being dominated by them. The decision-making stakeholder is ethically responsible for the risks their decisions about the AI impose on those affected by them. We illustrate our account of ethical risk for AI with two examples: AI-designed attachments for surgical robots that are optimised for treating specific patients, and self-driving ’robotaxis’ that carry passengers on public roads.