IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021 - 31

AI4Eq: For a True Global
Village Not for Global
Pillage
Angeles Manjarrés

Miguel A. Artaso

Inteligencia Artificial, ETSI, UNED, 28040 Madrid,
Spain

Inteligencia Artificial, ETSI, 28040 Madrid, Spain

Simon Pickin

Harvard FXB Center for Health and
Human Rights, Boston, MA 02115 USA

Sistemas Informáticos y de Computación, FDI,
UCM, 28040 Madrid, Spain

 The last few years have seen a large number
of initiatives on artificial intelligence (AI) ethics:
intergovernmental-institution initiatives such as " Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI " from the high-level
expert group on AI of the European Commission [1]
or the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) Council Recommendation
on Artificial Intelligence [2], government initiatives
such as that of the U.K. Parliament Select Committee
on Artificial Intelligence [3], industry initiatives on
AI ethical codes such as those of Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Intel, academic initiatives such as the Montreal declaration for the responsible development
of AI [4], the Stanford University 100 Year Study on
AI [5] or the Alan Turing Institute's " Understanding
Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Safety " [6], and
finally professional body initiatives such as the IEEE
Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous/Intelligent
Systems (A/IS) [7]. These initiatives, while acknowledging the potential of A/IS technologies to contribute to global socioeconomic solutions, highlight the
increasing challenges posed by these technologies
in the ethical, moral, legal, humanitarian, and sociopolitical domains.
Issues addressed include decision-making transparency, privacy, data security, and big-data-based
discrimination; wider concerns such as employment

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2021.3056290
Date of current version: 16 March 2021.

March 2021

Elizabeth Gibbons

and economic impacts, exacerbating climate
change, and effects on social well-being, human
rights, and democracy; and finally also effects on
physical and psychological health and on autonomy
of action. In essence, the initiatives seek to identify
potential benefits and risks of harm and then emit
recommendations regarding principles to be followed by the different actors involved.
This explosion of interest in the ethical aspects of
A/IS, the debate now having also reached the general public, has resulted in the publication of more
than 70 reports by large organizations in the last few
years according to [8] and [9] points to the need to
bring order to the resulting landscape of overabundance of ethical codes, guidelines, and frameworks,
many of which suffer from deficiencies such as
lack of scientific rigor, subjectiveness, incoherence,
superficiality, and redundancy, which creates confusion. Although devoting significant resources to writing reports while the uncontrolled deployment of
potentially harmful A/IS proceeds apace does have a
certain " fiddling while Rome burns " quality about it,
these reports do contain useful information. In [9],
five ethical principles are distilled to govern the production and deployment of A/IS: beneficence (protecting welfare and human rights), nonmaleficence
(avoiding causing physical or psychological harm,
in particular regarding privacy and security, applying
the precautionary principle to risks of harm), autonomy (ensuring decision-making and delegation of
such are well informed and adequately controlled),

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021

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