SIENNA's ethical analysis of AI and robotics
SIENNA has carried out an extensive ethical analysis of AI and robotics technologies, including their various manifestations and applications. Our work covers both present and potential future ethical issues, with a time horizon of twenty years.
The aim of the report is not to make recommendations or present solutions, but to identify and analyze ethical issues on three different levels:
- The report discusses general ethical issues in AI and robotics: issues that are at play across various manifestations and applications of AI and robotics. This covers issues in relation to autonomy and liberty, privacy, fairness and nondiscrimination, transparency, responsibility, dual use, machine ethics, as well as ethical issues in relation to fundamental techniques such as machine learning and knowledge representation.
- The report considers ethical issues that apply to specific AI and robotics products and systems, such as intelligent agents, decision-support systems, social robots and drones. Third and finally, ethical issues are considered in particular application domains of AI and robotics, such as healthcare, education, law enforcement and defense.
- Finally, we also pay attention to differences in attention to ethical issues in different countries within and beyond the European Union, differences we observed in an analysis of national academic and popular media debates on the ethical issues in AI and robotics in different EU and non-EU countries. This analysis is part of our larger effort to provide adequately informed implementation strategies for ethical AI and robotics.
Want to know more?
On 1 July 2020, we organised a webinar where we went over the main findings of the report: what are the key ethical issues for AI and robotics, in general, in relation to specific types of products and systems, and in relation to specific application domains? And what differences exist in national ethical debates on AI and robotics. Find out by watching the recording of the webinar, here or on YouTube, to hear what Philip Brey has to say about implications of our analysis for current strategic efforts towards ethical and trustworthy AI.