Munn, L. The uselessness of AI ethics.
AI Ethics (2022).
Abstract
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 meaningless principles which are contested or incoherent, making them difficult to apply; they are isolated principles situated in an industry and education system which largely ignores ethics; and they are toothless principles 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.
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Meaningless principles
The deluge of AI codes of ethics, frameworks, and guidelines in recent years has produced a corresponding raft of principles. Indeed, there are now regular meta-surveys which attempt to collate and summarize these principles. However, these principles are highly abstract and ambiguous, becoming incoherent. Mittelstadt suggests that work on AI ethics has largely produced “vague, high-level principles, and value statements which promise to be action-guiding, but in practice provide few specific recommendations and fail to address fundamental normative and political tensions embedded in key concepts.” The point here is not to debate the merits of any one value over another, but to highlight the fundamental lack of consensus around key terms. Commendable values like “fairness” and “privacy” break down when subjected to scrutiny, leading to disparate visions and deeply incompatible goals.
What are some common AI principles? Despite the mushrooming of ethical statements, Floridi and Cowls suggest many values recur frequently and can be condensed into five core principles: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, justice, and explicability. These ideals sound wonderful. After all, who could be against beneficence? However, problems immediately arise when we start to define what beneficence means. In the Montreal principles for instance, “well-being” is the term used, suggesting that AI development should promote the “well-being of all sentient creatures.” While laudable, clearly there are tensions to consider here. We might think, for instance, of how information technologies support certain conceptions of human flourishing by enabling communication and business transactions—while simultaneously contributing to carbon emissions, environmental degradation, and the climate crisis. In other words, AI promotes the well-being of some creatures (humans) while actively undermining the well-being of others.
The same issue occurs with the Statement on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. In this Statement, beneficence is gestured to through the concept of “sustainability,” asserting that AI must promote the basic preconditions for life on the planet. Few would argue directly against such a commendable aim. However, there are clearly wildly divergent views on how this goal should be achieved. Proponents of neoliberal interventions (free trade, globalization, deregulation) would argue that these interventions contribute to economic prosperity and in that sense sustain life on the planet. In fact, even the oil and gas industry champions the use of AI under the auspices of promoting sustainability. Sustainability, then, is a highly ambiguous or even intellectually empty term that is wrapped around disparate activities and ideologies. In a sense, sustainability can mean whatever you need it to mean. Indeed, even one of the members of the European group denounced the guidelines as “lukewarm” and “deliberately vague,” stating they “glossed over difficult problems” like explainability with rhetoric.
