Although ethical principles have been put forward by philosophers
through the ages, the first person to articulate ethical principles for
information technology was Norbert Wiener. In his book
The Human Use of Human Beings, first published in 1950,
Wiener based his computer ethics on what he called four great
principles of justice.
Freedom.
Justice requires “the liberty of each human being to develop in his
freedom the full measure of the human possibilities embodied in him.”
Equality.
Justice requires “the equality by which what is just for A and B
remains just when the positions of A and B are interchanged.”
Benevolence. Justice requires “a good will between man and man that knows no limits short of those of humanity itself.”
Minimum Infringement of Freedom.
“What compulsion the very existence of the community and the state may
demand must be exercised in such a way as to produce no unnecessary
infringement of freedom.”
Meanwhile, Isaac Asimov's
Three Laws of Robotics were developed in a series of short stories in
the 1940s, so this was around the same time that Wiener was developing
his ideas about cybernetics. Many writers on technology ethics argue
that robots (or any other form of technology) should be governed by
principles, and this idea is often credited to Asimov. But as far as I
can recall, in every Asimov story that mentions the
Three Laws of Robotics, some counter-example is produced to
demonstrate that the Three Laws don't actually work as intended. I
have therefore always regarded Asimov's work as being satirical
rather than prescriptive. (Similarly J.K. Rowling's descriptions of the
unsuccessful attempts by wizard civil servants to regulate the use of
magical technologies.)
So for several decades, the Wiener
approach to ethics prevailed, and discussion of computer ethics was
focused on a common set of human values:
life, health, security, happiness,
freedom, knowledge, resources, power and opportunity. (Source: SEP:
Computer and Information Ethics)
But
these principles were essentially no different to the principles one
would find in any other ethical domain. For many years, scholars
disagreed as to whether computer technology introduced an entirely new
set of ethical issues, and therefore called for a new set of principles.
The turning point was at the
ETHICOMP1995
conference in March 1995 (just two months before Bill Gates' Internet
Tidal Wave memo), with important presentations from Walter Maner (who had
been arguing this point for years) and Krystyna
Górniak-Kocikowska. From this point onwards, computer ethics would have
to address some additional challenges, including the global reach of the
technology - beyond the control of any single national regulator - and
the vast proliferation of actors and stakeholders. Terrell Bynum calls this the
Górniak hypothesis.
Picking
up the challenge, Luciano Floridi started to look at the ethical issues
raised by autonomous and interactive agents in cyberspace. In a 2001
paper on Artificial Evil with Jeff Sanders, he stated "It is clear that
something similar to Asimov's Laws of Robotics will need to be enforced
for the digital environment (the infosphere) to be kept safe."
Floridi's
work on Information Ethics (IE) represented an attempt to get away from
the prevailing anthropocentric worldview. "IE suggests that there is
something even more elemental than life, namely being – that is, the
existence and flourishing of all entities and their global environment –
and something more fundamental than suffering, namely entropy." He
therefore articulated a set of principles concerning ontological
equality (any instance of information/being enjoys a minimal, initial,
overridable, equal
right to exist and develop in a way which is appropriate to its nature)
and information entropy (which ought not to be caused in the infosphere,
ought to be prevented, ought to be removed). (Floridi 2006)
In
the past couple of years, there has been a flood of ethical principles
to choose from. In his latest blogpost, @
Alan_Winfield lists over twenty sets
of principles for robotics and AI published between January 2017 and April 2019, while AlgorithmWatch lists over fifty. Of particular interest may be the principles published by some
of the technology giants, as well as the absence of such principles from
some of the others. Meanwhile, Professor Floridi's more recent work on ethical
principles appears to be more conventionally anthropocentric.
The
impression one gets from all these overlapping sets of principles is of
lots of experts and industry bodies competing to express much the same
ideas in slightly different terms, in the hope that their version will
be adopted by everyone else.
But what would "adopted" actually mean? One possible answer is that these principles might feed into what I call
Upstream Ethics, contributing to a framework for both regulation and action. However some commentators have expressed scepticism as to the value of these principles. For example, @
InternetDaniel thinks that these lists of ethical principles are "too vague to be
effective", and suggests that this may even be intentional, these efforts being "largely designed to
fail". And @
EricNewcomer says "we're in a golden age for hollow corporate statements sold as high-minded ethical treatises".
As I wrote in an earlier piece on principles:
In business and engineering, as well as politics, it is customary to
appeal to "principles" to justify some business model, some technical
solution, or some policy. But these principles are usually so vague that
they provide very little concrete guidance. Profitability,
productivity, efficiency, which can mean almost anything you want them
to mean. And when principles interfere with what we really want to do,
we simply come up with a new interpretation of the principle, or another
overriding principle, which allows us to do exactly what we want while
dressing up the justification in terms of "principles". (January 2011)
The key question is about governance - how will these principles be applied and enforced, and by whom? What many people forget about Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics was that these weren't enforced by roving technology regulators, but were designed into the robots themselves, thanks to the fact that one corporation (U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc) had control over the relevant patents and therefore exercised a monopoly over the manufacture of robots. No doubt Google, IBM and Microsoft would like us to believe that they can be trusted to produce ethically safe products, but clearly this doesn't address the broader problem.
Following the
Górniak hypothesis, if these principles are to mean anything, they need to be taken seriously not only by millions of engineers but also by billions of technology users. And I think this in turn entails something like what Julia Black calls
Decentred Regulation, which I shall try to summarize in a future post. Hopefully this won't be just what Professor Floridi calls
Soft Ethics.
Update: My post on
Decentred Regulation and Responsible Technology is now available.
Algorithm Watch,
AI Ethics Guidelines Global Inventory
Terrell Bynum,
Computer and Information Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Luciano Floridi, Information Ethics - Its Nature and Scope (ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society · September 2006)
Luciano Floridi and Tim (Lord) Clement-Jones,
The five principles key to any ethical framework for AI (New Statesman, 20 March 2019)
Luciano
Floridi and J.W. Sanders, Artificial evil and the foundation of
computer ethics (Ethics and Information Technology 3: 55–66, 2001)
Eric Newcomer,
What Google's AI Principles Left Out (Bloomberg 8 June 2018)
Daniel Susser,
Ethics Alone Can’t Fix Big Tech (Slate, 17 April 2019)
Alan Winfield,
An Updated Round Up of Ethical Principles of Robotics and AI (18 April 2019)
Wikipedia:
Laws of Robotics,
Three Laws of Robotics
Related posts:
The Power of Principles (Not) (January 2011),
Data and Intelligence Principles from Major Players (June 2018),
Ethics Soft and Hard (February 2019),
Upstream Ethics (March 2019),
Ethics Committee Raises Alarm (April 2019),
Decentred Regulation and Responsible Technology (April 2019),
Automation Ethics (August 2019)
Link corrected 26 April 2019
