Ethics and future AI
While artificial intelligence technologies can improve our lives from health and social care to learning and decision-making, they also raise questions on ethical issues. VTT helps customers turn ethical and socially responsible AI into a competitive advantage.
Key facts: ethics and future AI
Forecasts indicate that AI revenues will surge in the coming years.
Ethical and socially responsible AI is a source of competitive advantage.
Ethical guidelines alone do not change the behavior of software developers.
AI ethics is concerned with advancing good life. Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts, such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime. AI ethics is a sub-field of applied ethics and technology that focuses on the ethical issues raised by the design, development, implementation and use of AI.
AI technologies are emergent and fast-evolving phenomena, whose consequences cut deep into the fabric of our lives, societies and ways of working. Although these systems are designed to reduce the need for human intervention, relevant questions remain about the responsible and ethical design and use of AI. What are the short-term and long-term impacts of AI technologies on individuals and societies, and on humanity in general?
Ethics can be a source of innovation when AI is used to promote positive impacts for individuals, society and the environment.
Algorithmic technologies have been utilised to destabilise democratic processes and for purposes of control, which may give rise to societies where panoptic surveillance and pervasive scoring affect all aspects of our lives. Against this backdrop, it is important to deploy efficient methodologies and processes, which include profound ethical thinking for future AI.
VTT cares about advancing the good life
VTT helps customers improve their design processes to ensure ethical and socially acceptable and desirable outcomes of AI technologies. This includes discussing ethical issues on a practical level to inform future technology design, and to examine the prevailing moral rules and norms of the users and what kind of impacts they have on the design decisions and on the quality of life of people and the planet.
Ultimately, it is about what ethical challenges the deployment of technology raises, how it could affect the society and the environment, which ethical principles are appropriate to follow, and what kind of context-specific ethical values and design principles should be embedded in the design outcomes.