• Medientyp: E-Artikel
  • Titel: The uselessness of AI ethics
  • Beteiligte: Munn, Luke
  • Erschienen: Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2023
  • Erschienen in: AI and Ethics, 3 (2023) 3, Seite 869-877
  • Sprache: Englisch
  • DOI: 10.1007/s43681-022-00209-w
  • ISSN: 2730-5961; 2730-5953
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  • Beschreibung: <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>As the awareness of AI’s power and danger has risen, the dominant response has been a turn to ethical principles. A flood of AI guidelines and codes of ethics have been released in both the public and private sector in the last several years. However, these are<jats:italic>meaningless principles</jats:italic>which are contested or incoherent, making them difficult to apply; they are<jats:italic>isolated principles</jats:italic>situated in an industry and education system which largely ignores ethics; and they are<jats:italic>toothless principles</jats:italic>which lack consequences and adhere to corporate agendas. For these reasons, I argue that AI ethical principles are useless, failing to mitigate the racial, social, and environmental damages of AI technologies in any meaningful sense. The result is a gap between high-minded principles and technological practice. Even when this gap is acknowledged and principles seek to be “operationalized,” the translation from complex social concepts to technical rulesets is non-trivial. In a zero-sum world, the dominant turn to AI principles is not just fruitless but a dangerous distraction, diverting immense financial and human resources away from potentially more effective activity. I conclude by highlighting alternative approaches to AI justice that go beyond ethical principles: thinking more broadly about systems of oppression and more narrowly about accuracy and auditing.</jats:p>