Towards An Ethics-Audit Bot

In this paper we focus on artificial intelligence (AI) for governance, not governance for AI, and on just one aspect of governance, namely ethics audit. Different kinds of ethical audit bots are possible, but who makes the choices and what are the implications? In this paper, we do not provide ethical/philosophical solutions, but rather focus on the technical aspects of what an AI-based solution for validating the ethical soundness of a target system would be like. We propose a system that is able to conduct an ethical audit of a target system, given certain socio-technical conditions. To be more specific, we propose the creation of a bot that is able to support organisations in ensuring that their software development lifecycles contain processes that meet certain ethical standards.

Automation: An Essential Component Of Ethical AI?

Ethics is sometimes considered to be too abstract to be meaningfully implemented in artificial intelligence (AI). In this paper, we reflect on other aspects of computing that were previously considered to be very abstract. Yet, these are now accepted as being done very well by computers. These tasks have ranged from multiple aspects of software engineering to mathematics to conversation in natural language with humans. This was done by automating the simplest possible step and then building on it to perform more complex tasks. We wonder if ethical AI might be similarly achieved and advocate the process of automation as key step in making AI take ethical decisions. The key contribution of this paper is to reflect on how automation was introduced into domains previously considered too abstract for computers.