Stephen FleischresserCosmos Magazine
Originally posted 18 Nov 19
Here is an excerpt:
His first argument concerns common aims and fiduciary duties, the duties in which trusted professionals, such as doctors, place other’s interests above their own. Medicine is clearly bound together by the common aim of promoting the health and well-being of patients and Mittelstadt argues that it is a “defining quality of a profession for its practitioners to be part of a ‘moral community’ with common aims, values and training”.
For the field of AI research, however, the same cannot be said. “AI is largely developed by the private sector for deployment in public (for example, criminal sentencing) and private (for example, insurance) contexts,” Mittelstadt writes. “The fundamental aims of developers, users and affected parties do not necessarily align.”
Similarly, the fiduciary duties of the professions and their mechanisms of governance are absent in private AI research.
“AI developers do not commit to public service, which in other professions requires practitioners to uphold public interests in the face of competing business or managerial interests,” he writes. In AI research, “public interests are not granted primacy over commercial interests”.
In a related point, Mittelstadt argues that while medicine has a professional culture that lays out the necessary moral obligations and virtues stretching back to the physicians of ancient Greece, “AI development does not have a comparable history, homogeneous professional culture and identity, or similarly developed professional ethics frameworks”.
Medicine has had a long time over which to learn from its mistakes and the shortcomings of the minimal guidance provided by the Hippocratic tradition. In response, it has codified appropriate conduct into modern principlism which provides fuller and more satisfactory ethical guidance.
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