Responsible AI: governing market failure

If society seeks or needs responsible development and use of AI technologies, how is this best achieved?

This month the Australian government published its analysis of public submissions on its April 2019 proposed 'Ethical AI Principles', and published a revised set of principles: here. 

In my April submission (in this repository) among other things I put three points, which I summarise here as I believe they remain 'live':

1. A national conversation

The first point was about processes, such as the public enquiry, of arriving at and promoting such lists of principles (whatever their content). This process or that of the Australian Human Rights Commission are no substitute for a genuine, scaled national conversation, indeed a global one. As I submitted, that conversation is not about 'what should our ethical AI principles look like' but (if AI is truly as transformative as we think) about the more fundamental question 'how should we live [and what role do we want and not want for technology in that attempt at flourishing]'.

2. The missing governance piece

The second point was to ask how the listed principles are intended to take or be given effect, which is a question not of ‘principles for ethical AI’ but of ‘the governance of principles for ethical AI’. Every major government and tech company has or is producing such lists. What are the mechanisms by which, in various contexts, we think they are best given effect? Since they are 'ethical' principles, I hesitate to say 'how are they complied with' and 'what are the consequences of non-compliance'. Which leads to my third point.

3. Ethics vs law / regulation

The third point was to suggest that the real question (in seeking submissions) ought not to be whether the 8 listed principles in the Australian framework are the ‘right’ or best or most complete ethical principles. Some ethical AI frameworks have more (e.g. Future of Life's 23), some have less (e.g. the OECD's 5, or Google's 7). The prior question ought to be whether responsible AI development and use is best approached as a question of ethics rather than as a question of law and regulation.

I reflected on this third issue in a previous post (here): there is a very live law and regulation aspect here (as useful as ethics-based approaches are, and complementary to law).

This month's revised approach notes:

• "The framework may need to be supplemented with regulations, depending on the risks for different AI applications. New regulations should only be implemented if there are clear regulatory gaps and a failure of the market to address those gaps."

This is, on one view, a remarkable proposition, if not an outright abdication of governmental responsibility for promoting responsible AI. 

It is a proposition, unless I am mistaken, that in relation to AI -- which the Australian framework process explicitly states is so fast-evolving, so profoundly transformative, so pervasive -- posits that:

(a) law and regulation is only a 'supplement' to ethics-based approaches; and

(b) the market [whatever that means!] should be left to address 'compliance' with ethical principles, and the people's elected law-making bodies should only have a role where gaps [whatever that means!] are 'clear' .

For one thing, by the time we diagnose that there has been a market failure to encourage or enforce responsible AI development and use, it will be rather too late to start asking law-makers to get out their legislative drafting pens and address 'gaps'.

Lawyers and law-makers can stand down: we are not needed here, or now. Australia, that sophisticated regulatory state, has decided that the market -- which of course has proven soooo socially responsible hitherto -- can regulate this issue just fine.

Jo 

'Ethical AI', business, and human rights

How and where does a human rights approach fit into current conversations about 'ethical Artificial Intelligence'?

I'm preparing my submission, due 31 May, to the Australian government's enquiry paper on ethical AI.

Naturally as a 'business and human rights' scholar I am among other things curious about the focus on ethical framings for these questions and issues, relative to legal and regulatory ones (including by reference to human rights concepts and law).

We're currently experiencing a cascade of words as various governmental, inter-governmental, corporate and professional bodies produce ethical frameworks. The Australian discussion paper suggests 8 core principles (fairness, accountability, explainability, etc); the recent European Commission one suggests 7 principles; Google advances 7, Microsoft 6, and so on -- all unobjectionable but inherently ambiguous, context-contingent terms / values / concepts. [See here for one recent inventory -- an attempt to list all these lists of ethical AI principles ... ]

This cascade of normative frameworks is accompanied by a tilt towards a greater focus on governmental action: a regulatory consciousness on ethical AI has been late coming, but is afoot (see here, for example: 'US to back international guidelines...'). Tech giants are calling for rather than necessarily resisting regulation.

While the gist of my upcoming May submission is that this subject-matter is about more than ethics in these sense that there's a law and regulation piece here (as useful as ethics-based approaches are, and complementary to law).

Yet in our chagrin as lawyers at the belated recognition that our discipline matters here, there is something more. These issues may be 'bigger' than ethics, but they are also bigger than and beyond just a conventional debate on law and governance. Certainly, human rights law is not necessarily and ideal vehicle for conducting and framing that debate.

What is involved around responsible innovation debates is really asking some fundamental questions about the future shape of human society. While necessary to this debate, law and especially human rights law are limited as a vernacular for having those debates.

In a seminar on May 8 I quoted Harari (2018) who rightly notes that we need a shared and coherent 'story' of what these technologies are for, how they do or do not advance a society of the sort that we want and recognise as 'good' and 'just':

".... We cannot continue this debate indefinitely … [v]ery soon someone will have to decide how to use this power [AI, etc] – based on some implicit or explicit story about the meaning of life … engineers are far less patient, and investors are the least patient of all. If you do not know what to do with the power [of these technologies, but also the power of how to govern them], market forces will not wait a thousand years for … an answer. The invisible hand of the market will force upon you its own blind reply..."

Jo

See previous posts on responsible innovation here.

Business, human rights and responsible innovation

We are increasingly governed and influenced by algorithms and predictive analysis.

The use by governments and businesses of artificial intelligence / machine learning (AI/ML) platforms can impact on human rights in myriad ways.

We have moved from debating whether governments need to regulate AI's potential discriminatory (etc.) effects, to questions of how best to do so in a legitimate, effective and coherent way: enabling innovation while protecting fundamental values and interests.

The nexus of 'new tech' and 'human rights' is presented as an emerging issue. Yet the rate of change and the implications of AI (etc.) across so many aspects of life suggest that it is only a regulatory consciousness that is still 'emerging'. All else is well underway.

Yes, we are far from the shallows now (as Lady Gaga / Bradley Cooper sing in A Star is Born (2018)): we are well in the deep waters now of how best to regulate for responsible innovation. And those deep waters are fast-moving ones, far faster than most regulatory and legal systems have moved.

This post relates to my hasty and under-cooked submission last week to the Australian Human Rights Commission / WEF 'White Paper' on 'AI and Human Rights: Leadership and Governance', itself related to a wider consultation (2018, ongoing).

One point made in that submission was a reflection on big tech firms' approach to the regulatory question. (This post is confined to that reflection -- the responsible innovation regulatory agenda is a far bigger and more complex one.)

The Commission's reports detail how influential CEOs -- from Microsoft to Amazon to Facebook -- are all now calling for or conceding the need for governmental regulatory frameworks on ethical AI / social impact / human rights (and these are not all the same thing, as my submission notes!).

These CEOs thus recognise the shift to the 'how' question, and are partly behind that shift, calling for regulation. Salesforce's CEO said at Davos last year that the role of governments and regulators was to come in and "point to True North".

Now most commentators have welcomed this. Like the Commission, they add this CEO's call to the chorus ('at least they are not resisting regulation' and 'business is inviting government to lead and steer'. A good thing).

Yet is it only me who finds something hugely troubling about this statement?

It is this. Is big tech so lacking in moral substance that it needs government to point out 'True North' (a set of general principles to guide AI design and use)? 'True North' is by definition universal and fairly easy to establish. Non-discrimination, user privacy, access to review and reasons for adverse decisions. These were basic societal values last time I looked at western democracies. They do not require governmental steer or compass reading for business. Get on with it, already.

Governments must lead the responsible innovation agenda, not least because their own use of AI is a key issue. Yet on the Salesforce CEO's statement, if industry cannot arrive at these values of its own accord, we truly are far from the shallows. As Lady Gaga sings, how will we remember ourselves this way -- before AI made life unrecognisable? 

Jo

Ps -- see an earlier blog here on 'big data' and human rights, and this one from November last year putting some of these themes into a short poem... !?