Competence

Designers of A IS should specify and operators should possess the knowledge and skill required for safe and effective operation.
Principle: Ethical Aspects of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, Jun 24, 2019

Published by IEEE

Related Principles

Reliability and safety

Throughout their lifecycle, AI systems should reliably operate in accordance with their intended purpose. This principle aims to ensure that AI systems reliably operate in accordance with their intended purpose throughout their lifecycle. This includes ensuring AI systems are reliable, accurate and reproducible as appropriate. AI systems should not pose unreasonable safety risks, and should adopt safety measures that are proportionate to the magnitude of potential risks. AI systems should be monitored and tested to ensure they continue to meet their intended purpose, and any identified problems should be addressed with ongoing risk management as appropriate. Responsibility should be clearly and appropriately identified, for ensuring that an AI system is robust and safe.

Published by Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, Australian Government in AI Ethics Principles, Nov 7, 2019

3. Principle 3 — Accountability

Issue: How can we assure that designers, manufacturers, owners, and operators of A IS are responsible and accountable? [Candidate Recommendations] To best address issues of responsibility and accountability: 1. Legislatures courts should clarify issues of responsibility, culpability, liability, and accountability for A IS where possible during development and deployment (so that manufacturers and users understand their rights and obligations). 2. Designers and developers of A IS should remain aware of, and take into account when relevant, the diversity of existing cultural norms among the groups of users of these A IS. 3. Multi stakeholder ecosystems should be developed to help create norms (which can mature to best practices and laws) where they do not exist because A IS oriented technology and their impacts are too new (including representatives of civil society, law enforcement, insurers, manufacturers, engineers, lawyers, etc.). 4. Systems for registration and record keeping should be created so that it is always possible to find out who is legally responsible for a particular A IS. Manufacturers operators owners of A IS should register key, high level parameters, including: • Intended use • Training data training environment (if applicable) • Sensors real world data sources • Algorithms • Process graphs • Model features (at various levels) • User interfaces • Actuators outputs • Optimization goal loss function reward function

Published by The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems in Ethically Aligned Design (v2): General Principles, (v1) Dec 13, 2016. (v2) Dec 12, 2017

Public Empowerment

Principle: The public’s ability to understand AI enabled services, and how they work, is key to ensuring trust in the technology. Recommendations: “Algorithmic Literacy” must be a basic skill: Whether it is the curating of information in social media platforms or self driving cars, users need to be aware and have a basic understanding of the role of algorithms and autonomous decision making. Such skills will also be important in shaping societal norms around the use of the technology. For example, identifying decisions that may not be suitable to delegate to an AI. Provide the public with information: While full transparency around a service’s machine learning techniques and training data is generally not advisable due to the security risk, the public should be provided with enough information to make it possible for people to question its outcomes.

Published by Internet Society, "Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Policy Paper" in Guiding Principles and Recommendations, Apr 18, 2017

Third principle: Understanding

AI enabled systems, and their outputs, must be appropriately understood by relevant individuals, with mechanisms to enable this understanding made an explicit part of system design. Effective and ethical decision making in Defence, from the frontline of combat to back office operations, is always underpinned by appropriate understanding of context by those making decisions. Defence personnel must have an appropriate, context specific understanding of the AI enabled systems they operate and work alongside. This level of understanding will naturally differ depending on the knowledge required to act ethically in a given role and with a given system. It may include an understanding of the general characteristics, benefits and limitations of AI systems. It may require knowledge of a system’s purposes and correct environment for use, including scenarios where a system should not be deployed or used. It may also demand an understanding of system performance and potential fail states. Our people must be suitably trained and competent to operate or understand these tools. To enable this understanding, we must be able to verify that our AI enabled systems work as intended. While the ‘black box’ nature of some machine learning systems means that they are difficult to fully explain, we must be able to audit either the systems or their outputs to a level that satisfies those who are duly and formally responsible and accountable. Mechanisms to interpret and understand our systems must be a crucial and explicit part of system design across the entire lifecycle. This requirement for context specific understanding based on technically understandable systems must also reach beyond the MOD, to commercial suppliers, allied forces and civilians. Whilst absolute transparency as to the workings of each AI enabled system is neither desirable nor practicable, public consent and collaboration depend on context specific shared understanding. What our systems do, how we intend to use them, and our processes for ensuring beneficial outcomes result from their use should be as transparent as possible, within the necessary constraints of the national security context.

Published by The Ministry of Defence (MOD), United Kingdom in Ethical Principles for AI in Defence, Jun 15, 2022

4 Foster responsibility and accountability

Humans require clear, transparent specification of the tasks that systems can perform and the conditions under which they can achieve the desired level of performance; this helps to ensure that health care providers can use an AI technology responsibly. Although AI technologies perform specific tasks, it is the responsibility of human stakeholders to ensure that they can perform those tasks and that they are used under appropriate conditions. Responsibility can be assured by application of “human warranty”, which implies evaluation by patients and clinicians in the development and deployment of AI technologies. In human warranty, regulatory principles are applied upstream and downstream of the algorithm by establishing points of human supervision. The critical points of supervision are identified by discussions among professionals, patients and designers. The goal is to ensure that the algorithm remains on a machine learning development path that is medically effective, can be interrogated and is ethically responsible; it involves active partnership with patients and the public, such as meaningful public consultation and debate (101). Ultimately, such work should be validated by regulatory agencies or other supervisory authorities. When something does go wrong in application of an AI technology, there should be accountability. Appropriate mechanisms should be adopted to ensure questioning by and redress for individuals and groups adversely affected by algorithmically informed decisions. This should include access to prompt, effective remedies and redress from governments and companies that deploy AI technologies for health care. Redress should include compensation, rehabilitation, restitution, sanctions where necessary and a guarantee of non repetition. The use of AI technologies in medicine requires attribution of responsibility within complex systems in which responsibility is distributed among numerous agents. When medical decisions by AI technologies harm individuals, responsibility and accountability processes should clearly identify the relative roles of manufacturers and clinical users in the harm. This is an evolving challenge and remains unsettled in the laws of most countries. Institutions have not only legal liability but also a duty to assume responsibility for decisions made by the algorithms they use, even if it is not feasible to explain in detail how the algorithms produce their results. To avoid diffusion of responsibility, in which “everybody’s problem becomes nobody’s responsibility”, a faultless responsibility model (“collective responsibility”), in which all the agents involved in the development and deployment of an AI technology are held responsible, can encourage all actors to act with integrity and minimize harm. In such a model, the actual intentions of each agent (or actor) or their ability to control an outcome are not considered.

Published by World Health Organization (WHO) in Key ethical principles for use of artificial intelligence for health, Jun 28, 2021