FCAI Ethics Advisory Board: ethics matters

In November, the FCAI Ethics Advisory Board hosted a panel event titled “AuroraAI – a vision of the everyday”. The panel discussion, approaching the question of challenges and lessons learned, was to be a kind of resolution and apologia, a settling of accounts, or a reaching for the bottomline, of a governmental artificial intelligence venture many have described as difficult to grasp. Santeri Räisänen's (University of Helsinki) blog post presents some of the problematics in the ethics of unsettled technologies which the panel discussion brought to his mind.

Suomen tekoälykeskuksen (FCAI) Ethics Advisory Board:in järjestämässä paneelikeskustelussa Helsingin Tiedekulmassa 20.11.2023 pohdittiin mitä opittiin Aurora AI:sta. Aurora AI oli valtion hanke, joka tähtäsi kansalaisten viranomaisasioinnin helpottamiseen tekoälyn avulla. Nina Wessberg (VTT), yksi paneelin asiantuntijoista, pohtii aihetta tarkemmin blogikirjoituksessaan.

Milloin tekoälytutkija pohtii tutkimukseensa linkittyviä eettisiä kysymyksiä? Miten näitä kysymyksiä tulisi ratkoa?

Does AI need rules? What is the ‘AI’ the EU is aiming to regulate in its new proposal? How does the regulation affect innovation? What could be the implications internationally and nationally for Finland when EU moves forward with AI regulation?

When discussions turn to artificial intelligence, there is an expectation of complexity. Its implementation, however, is all about simplicity, about making something complex so simple that even a computer could run it.

How is law regulating Artificial Intelligence (AI)? How do we ensure AI applications comply with existing legal rules and principles? Is new regulation needed and if yes, what type of regulation?

The development of ethical artificial intelligence seems to be emerging as a hot topic. Various ethical, fair, and human-centred principles and norms for AI are being publicised around the world. They have a common aim: to list the values considered crucial. When compiled into a code of ethics, they set the goal for doing good in many ways. Since the outlined principles are general in nature, it is often hard to make out what it would take to carry them out, and how they could be put into practice.

“Technologies often do much more and very different things than what they were supposed to achieve.” With this statement, Frederica Lucivero (2018) warns us not take for granted the claims that technology will realize certain values. Instead, we need to analyze the plausibility of such claims, that is, the future (tech) artifact, its use, value and potential impacts.