2 RESPECT FOR AUTONOMY PRINCIPLE

AIS must be developed and used while respecting people’s autonomy, and with the goal of increasing people’s control over their lives and their surroundings. 1) AIS must allow individuals to fulfill their own moral objectives and their conception of a life worth living. 2) AIS must not be developed or used to impose a particular lifestyle on individuals, whether directly or indirectly, by implementing oppressive surveillance and evaluation or incentive mechanisms. 3) Public institutions must not use AIS to promote or discredit a particular conception of the good life. 4) It is crucial to empower citizens regarding digital technologies by ensuring access to the relevant forms of knowledge, promoting the learning of fundamental skills (digital and media literacy), and fostering the development of critical thinking. 5) AIS must not be developed to spread untrustworthy information, lies, or propaganda, and should be designed with a view to containing their dissemination. 6) The development of AIS must avoid creating dependencies through attention capturing techniques or the imitation of human characteristics (appearance, voice, etc.) in ways that could cause confusion between AIS and humans.
Principle: The Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence, Dec 4, 2018

Published by University of Montreal

Related Principles

3 PROTECTION OF PRIVACY AND INTIMACY PRINCIPLE

Privacy and intimacy must be protected from AIS intrusion and data acquisition and archiving systems (DAAS). 1) Personal spaces in which people are not subjected to surveillance or digital evaluation must be protected from the intrusion of AIS and data acquisition and archiving systems (DAAS). 2) The intimacy of thoughts and emotions must be strictly protected from AIS and DAAS uses capable of causing harm, especially uses that impose moral judgments on people or their lifestyle choices. 3) People must always have the right to digital disconnection in their private lives, and AIS should explicitly offer the option to disconnect at regular intervals, without encouraging people to stay connected. 4) People must have extensive control over information regarding their preferences. AIS must not create individual preference profiles to influence the behavior of the individuals without their free and informed consent. 5) DAAS must guarantee data confidentiality and personal profile anonymity. 6) Every person must be able to exercise extensive control over their personal data, especially when it comes to its collection, use, and dissemination. Access to AIS and digital services by individuals must not be made conditional on their abandoning control or ownership of their personal data. 7) Individuals should be free to donate their personal data to research organizations in order to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. 8) The integrity of one’s personal identity must be guaranteed. AIS must not be used to imitate or alter a person’s appearance, voice, or other individual characteristics in order to damage one’s reputation or manipulate other people.

Published by University of Montreal in The Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence, Dec 4, 2018

4 SOLIDARITY PRINCIPLE

The development of AIS must be compatible with maintaining the bonds of solidarity among people and generations. 1) AIS must not threaten the preservation of fulfilling moral and emotional human relationships, and should be developed with the goal of fostering these relationships and reducing people’s vulnerability and isolation. 2) AIS must be developed with the goal of collaborating with humans on complex tasks and should foster collaborative work between humans. 3) AIS should not be implemented to replace people in duties that require quality human relationships, but should be developed to facilitate these relationships. 4) Health care systems that use AIS must take into consideration the importance of a patient’s relationships with family and health care staff. 5) AIS development should not encourage cruel behavior toward robots designed to resemble human beings or non human animals in appearance or behavior. 6) AIS should help improve risk management and foster conditions for a society with a more equitable and mutual distribution of individual and collective risks.

Published by University of Montreal in The Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence, Dec 4, 2018

5 DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION PRINCIPLE

AIS must meet intelligibility, justifiability, and accessibility criteria, and must be subjected to democratic scrutiny, debate, and control. 1) AIS processes that make decisions affecting a person’s life, quality of life, or reputation must be intelligible to their creators. 2) The decisions made by AIS affecting a person’s life, quality of life, or reputation should always be justifiable in a language that is understood by the people who use them or who are subjected to the consequences of their use. Justification consists in making transparent the most important factors and parameters shaping the decision, and should take the same form as the justification we would demand of a human making the same kind of decision. 3) The code for algorithms, whether public or private, must always be accessible to the relevant public authorities and stakeholders for verification and control purposes. 4) The discovery of AIS operating errors, unexpected or undesirable effects, security breaches, and data leaks must imperatively be reported to the relevant public authorities, stakeholders, and those affected by the situation. 5) In accordance with the transparency requirement for public decisions, the code for decision making algorithms used by public authorities must be accessible to all, with the exception of algorithms that present a high risk of serious danger if misused. 6) For public AIS that have a significant impact on the life of citizens, citizens should have the opportunity and skills to deliberate on the social parameters of these AIS, their objectives, and the limits of their use. 7) We must at all times be able to verify that AIS are doing what they were programmed for and what they are used for. 8) Any person using a service should know if a decision concerning them or affecting them was made by an AIS. 9) Any user of a service employing chatbots should be able to easily identify whether they are interacting with an AIS or a real person. 10) Artificial intelligence research should remain open and accessible to all.

Published by University of Montreal in The Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence, Dec 4, 2018

6 EQUITY PRINCIPLE

The development and use of AIS must contribute to the creation of a just and equitable society. 1) AIS must be designed and trained so as not to create, reinforce, or reproduce discrimination based on — among other things — social, sexual, ethnic, cultural, or religious differences. 2) AIS development must help eliminate relationships of domination between groups and people based on differences of power, wealth, or knowledge. 3) AIS development must produce social and economic benefits for all by reducing social inequalities and vulnerabilities. 4) Industrial AIS development must be compatible with acceptable working conditions at every step of their life cycle, from natural resources extraction to recycling, and including data processing. 5) The digital activity of users of AIS and digital services should be recognized as labor that contributes to the functioning of algorithms and creates value. 6) Access to fundamental resources, knowledge and digital tools must be guaranteed for all. 7) We should support the development of commons algorithms — and of open data needed to train them — and expand their use, as a socially equitable objective.

Published by University of Montreal in The Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence, Dec 4, 2018

7 DIVERSITY INCLUSION PRINCIPLE

The development and use of AIS must be compatible with maintaining social and cultural diversity and must not restrict the scope of lifestyle choices or personal experiences. 1) AIS development and use must not lead to the homogenization of society through the standardization of behaviours and opinions. 2) From the moment algorithms are conceived, AIS development and deployment must take into consideration the multitude of expressions of social and cultural diversity present in the society. 3) AI development environments, whether in research or industry, must be inclusive and reflect the diversity of the individuals and groups of the society. 4) AIS must avoid using acquired data to lock individuals into a user profile, fix their personal identity, or confine them to a filtering bubble, which would restrict and confine their possibilities for personal development — especially in fields such as education, justice, or business. 5) AIS must not be developed or used with the aim of limiting the free expression of ideas or the opportunity to hear diverse opinions, both of which being essential conditions of a democratic society. 6) For each service category, the AIS offering must be diversified to prevent de facto monopolies from forming and undermining individual freedoms.

Published by University of Montreal in The Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence, Dec 4, 2018