Are we at the dawn of a terrifying upheaval generated by the merger of Biotech and Infotech or are these forecasts still an example of hysteria without real foundations given the lack of certainty, even in the mid-term? Where are we in terms of regulation and Ethics for the protection of the arms race and Human Rights?
In any case, we are witnessing a certain effervescence in terms of AI regulation, much more masked in the USA, North Korea or Putin’s Russia, especially in terms of an unbridled arms race.
Artificial Intelligence can be beneficial in a wide range of sectors, such as health care, energy consumption, vehicle safety, agriculture, climate change and financial risk management. It can also contribute to the detection of fraud and threats to cybersecurity, and enables law enforcement authorities to fight crime more effectively.
However, it raises new issues for the future of work and raises legal and ethical issues. But in the face of all these questions, which are beyond the reach of decision-makers, it was more than necessary in our democratic societies to define major strategic lines of action in order to put the States and the ordinary citizen-consumers on guard.
At this stage, the European Union has recently published a set of recommendations and rules to develop ethical and responsible artificial intelligence applications . This work carried out by a group of about fifty experts is quite agreed, recalling major ethical principles to guide this field.
As The Verge ironicizes : “ most of the proposals are a little abstract and remain based on vague and general principles.
Perhaps this irony came from a misunderstanding of the European legal system and clearly a more than obvious lack of certainty in the medium term.
Indeed, the more general the proposals are, the more they allow the legal system to adapt more precisely to cases that were unpredictable at the time when the principles/recommendations were adopted. This judicial syllogism is inapplicable in Anglo-Saxon or American judicial systems where everything must be planned, recorded in advance at the risk of falling more easily into a legal vacuum given the speed of technological change. But reality is much more versatile!
What does Ethics tell us?
The German philosopher and ethicist, Thomas Metzinger , was one of the philosophers who participated in this commission. In the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, he publishes an article where he wonders whether he has not finally participated in the “washing” ambient ethics, i.e. whether the work he has done does not justify a form of ethics that is not really one!
From the outset, he concedes:
“The result is a compromise of which I am not proud, but which is nevertheless the best in the world in this area”.
In fact, the United States or China, leaders in AI, have not published guidelines to guide AI, R&D and development.
These first principles, although imperfect, should certainly inspire the future production of legal compliance principles on these issues and certainly lead to the production of regulatory frameworks.
But we are not there yet!
For the time being, the recommendations are lukewarm, short-sighted and deliberately vague. They ignore long-term risks, hide difficult problems (such as “explainability”) through rhetoric, violate the basic principles of rationality and claim to know things that no one really knows.
It is a wonder to see this philosopher explain that in his working group, composed of 52 people, only a handful were specialists in Ethics (most of them were politicians, civil society, a few researchers and, above all, representatives of industry).
