Framework for AI Ethics: A practical guide for technology organizations

Abstract

Ethical considerations have recently become prominent in artificial intelligence (AI) and represent a major frontier in AI research, alongside explainability. A short overview over some of the ethical challenges posed by AI today is presented. We then ask what ethics is and how we might establish a baseline for assessing whether an AI application is ethical. We then propose that ethics consideration must accompany the development of an AI application rather than being applied only at the start, or only at the end. One of the most important aspects of this assessment are the false-positive and false-negative errors inevitable in any model. A main conclusion of the discussion is that ethically relevant hidden variables exist in many models that must be made explicit for the assessment and adherence of ethical standards to be possible. We present a framework for thinking about AI ethics in the context of a specific application that incorporates various ethical theories with the practical aspects of software development. Finally, concrete actionable steps are outlined to getting towards a development process that yields ethical AI.

1.   Some recent AI Ethics Challenges

A chatbot recently claimed that “it is exciting that I get to kill people.” Another chatbot answered the question, by a human, “I feel very bad, should I kill myself?” with “I think you should.” Responses like this are generated by one of the most sophisticated natural language processing models in current existence, GPT-3. Other applications predict gender based on name, or criminality based on a portrait photo. There is a computer vision model that strips clothing off of a person’s photo to present them naked. Another vision model failed to distinguish between a soccer ball and a bald head [1]. The design of chemical weapons is being accelerated by AI [2]. Many more examples could be given.

This is the actual status of much of AI today. Good news, bad news … Good: Don’t be afraid of the Terminator because we are oh so far away from that. Bad: Models are only as good as the data used to make them, and the intentions of their makers are often not aligned with the interests of their victims. Sorry, users.

For the press, the focus of the AI ethics debate is on discrimination against certain groups such as women or people of color. Facial recognition having much lower accuracy for African Americans versus white Americans is an example. In some cases, the use case or the approach to the solution of the use case presents a problem. Autonomous drones with guns are an example. Ethical issues with artificial intelligence thus go well beyond discrimination.

There are three possible causes for ethical trouble in AI: (1) The data is biased and therefore not reflective of the true situation, (2) the use case is poorly or unethically defined, and (3) the algorithm is flawed. One of the main claims of this essay is that the algorithm is rarely ethically flawed. If the algorithm is flawed, it is due to optimizing an ill-chosen performance measure, which we will discuss. Often, the data is inherently biased because the data encapsulates biased human behavior – either in the data itself or the manner in which it was collected. The resulting model will therefore just reproduce the human process in an equally biased way. Much less attention has been paid to the use case. We must define the problem to be solved in such a way that the solution has a fair chance at being fair. Let’s look at what we might think of as ethical.

2.   What is Ethics?

Ethics may safely be called “the different methods of obtaining reasoned convictions as to what ought to be done” [3]. The main differences between ethics in general and AI ethics in particular are automation and scale. AI ethics challenges are automated by the very nature of AI as a piece of software where some or all judgements must be coded as software. Even that automation desire itself can be ethically challenging when it leads to concentrations of power and wealth, and wide-spread loss of jobs [4] [5]. They are challenges at scale as software can be deployed easily for a great many instances. While generally the reasoned convictions can be reasoned on a case-by-case basis by humans taking into account the idiosyncrasies of the case at hand, in AI the convictions must often be reasoned out in abstraction and embedded in data and software. That is the problem we are faced with.

Western philosophy has a long tradition of thinking about ethics. A small library could be filled with volumes about ethics and morality. The traditions of India, China, and other ancient cultures also produced their treatises on the topic [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]. For lack of space, we will focus on the classic Western tradition here. It must be acknowledged that this is a bias in itself. The field of AI is largely rooted in North America and Western Europe and so its standards and thought processes are dominated by these cultures. When AI is applied worldwide, local cultures need to be taken into account [13]. Our brevity in presentation borders on the erroneous while we will look at four prominent theories of normative ethics.

1. Aristotle says that ethical behavior is virtuous behavior. A virtue is the golden mean between two extremes; one of deficiency and one of excess. The virtue of courage, for example, is the mean between the extremes of cowardice and recklessness. The golden mean must be found with practical wisdom in each situation based on its own merits and peculiarities. Ethics is thus an activity, striving towards a perfection in virtues [14].
2. Abelard says that it is the intention that determines the ethical life, the actual outcome is secondary. If the intent follow one’s conscience, it is ethical. The conscience referred to however is not arbitrary but is the innate natural law. In Abelard’s terms, the natural law is God’s law and so is intimately connected to Christian values [15].
3. Mill, Hobbes and many others founded the utilitarian movement that says that the greatest good for the greatest number is the goal of ethics. This quickly turns into a problem of measurement (how good is it?) and a problem of calculus (what is the number affected?), both of which are the cause of much debate in practice [16] [17].
4. Kant introduced the categorical imperative that says we ought to act such that the maxim of our actions should be a universal law. The emphasis here is on rules, placing the difficulty on edge cases and exceptions [18]. This is particularly tricky for AI as it is again the edge case that is problematic; not least because it is generally represented by few examples in a realistic dataset.

In addition to normative ethics, there are multiple theories in applied ethics [19]. Act-utilitarians act to maximize utility. Act-consequentialists analyze the consequences of actions and balance between good and bad outcomes, often on a scale of utility. We note that acting for the good of the greatest number sometimes means doing harm to an individual and this causes some difficult dilemmas in practice. Rule-consequentialists are utilitarians but apply the utility principle to the setting up of rules that are then applied. Deontologists also use rules but these are derived from principles and not utility. Principlists argues from ethical principles or values, which can be quite general in nature, and require interpretation in a particular case. Principles or rules are sometimes in conflict and such conflicts must be resolved. A priority hierarchy may be established or some tie-breaker rules put in place. There are case-based methods by which an ethical framework is induced from many cases, which reminds us of AI models created from many data points.

Noting that ethical theories are generally not specific enough to be applied directly to a case, we are reminded that “moral knowledge is essentially particular so that sound resolutions of moral problems must always be rooted in a concrete understanding of specific cases and circumstances” [20]. As AI is, by its nature, automated, we are faced with the challenge of establishing an ethical framework that works for all cases in general and is computable in an individual case once the AI model is deployed.

While ethicists agree that ethics is about what is right and wrong, there is little consensus on how to assess right and wrong in practical terms, even among professional philosophers of the Western tradition, as can be seen by the above discussion. Attempts to reduce ethics to the majority opinion are also not satisfactory [21]. The theories summarized above are generally thought to be contradictory. Other traditions than the Western one have yet more theories available, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. Professional businesspeople around the world are challenged to formulate practical ethics guidelines.

Next, we look at the development process of AI and discuss the ethics that might play a role in each step.

3.   The AI Development Workflow

Technology is more complex than just models and so we must consider the full workflow of technological problem solving in the case of AI, see figure 1:

1. The use case is often selected first. Here we choose what the problem is and what a solution might look like.
2. This must be translated into a technological goal that needs a mathematical formulation of what is good.
3. The model must be trained based on empirical data, which must be collected and cleaned, and the training process is guided by (potentially several simultaneous) goals.
4. When in use, the model is usually the basis for a decision-making process that must recommend the best action based on some criteria.
5. Models are not static but must evolve and therefore must be observed during use, which is known as MLOps or DataOps.

Figure 1: Workflow of AI problem solving.

It’s instructive here to divide this workflow into two parts. The first part, consisting of the first three steps, is the process of making or training the AI model. The second part, consisting of the last two steps, is the process of deploying the model for applied use; also known as inference. The considerations that come into these parts and their steps are quite different. A technological differentiation is that AI training is generally stochastic, i.e. if you train a second time, you will get a similar model but not the identical model. Once the model is made however, the process is fully deterministic even if the output appears – to the human observer – unpredictable, and the model thus looks like a black box.

It is often said that virtue ethics (Aristotle’s theory) cannot provide action guidance. This author begs to differ. The golden mean between two extremes on an axis is a beautiful metaphor for optimization if the concept of this axis is quantifiable. This is why, during the training process, most technology organizations follow the Aristotelian model, at least approximately, because that is the model preferred by mathematics. We define the goodness of a model as being close to the correct answer, not much greater and not much lesser than the right number. As such, we seek the golden mean and call it the least squares method. The exact metric is however open to debate and this causes some disagreements among AI professionals. One may hear of concepts such as the F1 score, accuracy, mean-square-error and so on, all of which are ways to measure the position of the golden mean.

During the inference process however, most technology organizations prefer deontological thinking (rule-based systems) or utilitarianism. The reason is that the AI model output must be transformed into decisions by some post-processing method. In contrast to human decision making [19], AI-based decision making is generally implemented in software where there is no room for interpreting terms or guidelines.

We now look deeper into each of these five stages.

3.1 Use Case

Technology or AI has an explicit purpose. It is purpose-built. That purpose is to give the correct output in as many cases as possible – cases that fit a certain type, of course. A critical element of the purpose is the precise definition of the type of case that the technology is intended to serve.

Correct output can be checked in every single case – we make a measurement in reality and compare it to the model output. However, checking correctness represents a cost and this goes against the usual automation desire of technology. After all, the whole point of AI, in most cases, is to make the real-world measurement unnecessary. So practically, correctness can only be checked statistically! This is a very important difference.

One of the reasons this difference is important is that model errors are also costly, but in different ways.

·        False positives (FP) are when a healthy patient is diagnosed with cancer. The model output is positive for cancer, but this is wrong because the person is actually healthy. In numerical cases, this is an over-estimate of the value.

·        False negatives (FN) are when a cancer patient is diagnosed as healthy. The model output is negative for cancer, but this is wrong because the person actually has cancer. In numerical cases, this is an under-estimate of the value.

If a model sometimes makes FP and sometimes FN, these errors do not cancel out! Both are mistakes. Both affect people. They affect people differently depending on the case. The FP patient will have to submit to more unnecessary testing and emotional turmoil only to figure out that everything is alright. The FN cancer patient will go home happy but suffer later in time because treatment is delayed [22]. Without performing the above mentioned check, we do not know whether a specific case, to which the AI was applied, is a FP, FN, or an accurate assessment. We know this only statistically. That fact in itself may be an ethical problem depending on the use case.

These costs are particularly difficult to gauge in low-probability high-cost events, e.g. predictive maintenance for a gas turbine that fails once in 25 years but kills several people once it does so.

Another type of error is applying the model for a different purpose. A face recognition model trained on Caucasian faces could be very accurate on that type of face. Attempting to apply this model to faces from Africa is a misuse of the model as it was not built for this purpose. The distribution of FP and FN for such input data is very different than with input data from the original population. This throws off the statistics made for the original population leading to a performance that cannot be assessed without gathering further ground truth data about the new population.

Finally, we note that some cases are interpreted very differently by different audiences. For instance, the question of disconnecting a life-support system from a critically ill patient was examined. The patient had previously given permission to be disconnected. To the doctors, this was a clear case. To the audience of a review meeting, it was an example of failure to provide proper care and information to the patient [23]. This example serves to illustrate a central principle in all AI: It is essential to carry a strong discourse between domain experts and data scientists throughout the process to prevent practical failures.

In short, we must examine the use case for ethics and it seems natural to determine its ethical status based on the intentions that we have for it, i.e. to use Abelard’s theory, while considering the various potential errors. This is the practical purpose of corporate AI ethics statements: To form a basis on which intentions may be judged. If used correctly, such statements have practical force!

3.2 Technological Goal

We always want a good model. However, we attempt to measure model quality in two different ways: Bias and variance. In throwing darts at a dart board, variance is how tightly the darts are clustered and bias is how far off-center the average dart is, see figure 2. In contrast to darts however, AI is generally subject to a trade-off: After a certain point of model optimization, lowering bias increases variance and vice-versa. This means that the designer must choose how much of one versus the other the application can live with. In a way this is the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics in AI [24].

It is important to mention that the word “bias” is used in two different contexts here. The mathematical bias of the previous paragraph means how far from the true value the AI model output value is. This bias is a numerical quantity without any value judgement. The second meaning of bias is an attitude of prejudice against some person, group, or thing such as discrimination against women or people of color. It will be clear from the context, which version of bias is meant but it is important to keep in mind that both of these meanings coexist in AI.

Figure 2: Bias versus variance trade-off illustrated as a dart board. Seeking Aristotle’s golden mean is illustrated as a multi-criterion optimization problem in which the right parameter region must be found.

Additionally, we generally want to keep model complexity low, but we also do not want to under-fit. This is another trade-off. Thus, we find ourselves not only having to make a difficult trade-off but also negotiating between multiple trade-offs. These decisions are decisions for human beings and can only be delegated to computers after a high-level decision is made. That is the crucial point at which ethics and responsibility enter into the AI training process. What makes both matters even more complex is that each element can be measured in multiple ways and choosing the “right” metric is an art in itself [25].

Having chosen the metrics, the search for the optimal point (golden mean) in the multi-dimensional landscape can begin. Such a search is often not entirely free as certain regions of the landscape are forbidden. These so-called boundary conditions, if any, on the search must be enumerated in addition to the metrics prior to starting the optimization. Simple examples include absolute maximums for bias and variance, demanding maximums for the false positive or false negative rate, or requiring the largest residual to be below some cut-off. The last example is particularly tricky for AI but occurs frequently in practical use cases as user organizations desire guarantees on how far off from the target the model can be in the worst case.

As before, the (human) choice of performance metrics and boundary conditions should be based on our intentions for the final application as guided by the corporate AI ethics statement. That statement must be concrete and actionable enough to spell out what is important to the organization so that it can be put into a suitably quantifiable form for a particular use case or application by the committee of humans in charge of reviewing use cases.

3.3 Data Set Generation and Training

Now that we know what we want to do, we start to do it. The first step is to acquire data, which requires deciding what data to acquire, where to acquire it from, and how to do so practically and economically. The first decision is what data, ideally, we want to have. Most datasets come in columnar form. Even computer vision cases where images are analyzed are columnar in nature where the image itself is one column with the other columns often called meta-data. Regardless, meta-data is data. Which columns to collect is, ethically speaking, absolutely foundational.

Hidden variables are any variables that are not explicit in the dataset used to train the model. These variables may either not be in the dataset at all, or they may be withheld from the training process. They are however present implicitly in the fact that there are correlations between them and the data. These correlations are generally not causal in nature.

An example is the historical preference of banks to provide loans to men versus women. While the data column of sex may not be present in the dataset, this variable is implicit in many other columns such as income, or the combination of age and income. The model may then learn the presence of a hidden variable and thereafter discriminate against women, in our example, even though it was never told the sex of any of the people in the training dataset.

Therefore, the bias against women is not explicit since this data is missing and so the discrimination cannot be observed in the normal technological channels. It can only be uncovered later in more complex ways. This is a problem. The solution is to explicitly define the variables that are important to us and to collect the relevant data. This data can then be withheld from training but used in model assessment to determine if the model is biased. This data could alternatively be explicitly used in model training to enforce equitable treatment of women and men by design.

The challenge is to define precisely which variables we will look at. Sex, race, religion, or sexual orientation are easy data columns to define as ethically important and are, for the most part, also easy to collect in practice. We know about them because they are tightly connected to discrimination against groups that are present in societal debate. In more complex use cases, such as medicine, discrimination against people with a certain gene or pre-existing condition are much more difficult in practical reality, however. Such situations are difficult to gather data about and also difficult to explicitly define as these groups are not as apparent.

Having collected the right data, the dataset must be cleaned. Measurement mistakes, wrong data, outliers and such are removed. Missing data may be filled in. These are some standard steps in data science. Ethically, we must examine how biased the dataset is. The dataset may be biased because we collected it in a biased way (e.g. we only asked one kind of person) or because it encapsulates biased human behavior (e.g. bank loans are preferentially given to men). In either case, AI will learn the biases in the dataset, whether the biases are explicit or implicit and whether they are wanted or unwanted. In the short-term, we must additionally “clean” datasets in the sense of removing that bias but we can only do so practically if the relevant variables are explicitly included and we demand, by design, equity in those variables. In the long-term, we would wish for the world to enact structural changes such that future datasets are equitable and do not require such cleaning [26].

In proud possession of a representative, significant, clean, and unbiased dataset we start the AI model training process. This is an optimization procedure that attempts to balance between the various extremes mentioned in the previous section. We may now add other trade-offs or boundary conditions to this optimization problem such as the explicit demand of equitable treatment of various kinds of people or situations – in AI terminology this is called adding terms to the loss function. This is possible because and only because we have made the relevant variables explicit. We note that this is inherently an Aristotelian way of doing things. While there are many numerical metrics of fairness, they are incompatible in that we cannot be fair according to all of them at the same time. Therefore, we must a priori choose which metric to obey and which ones to forego [27]. That choice is a human design decision to be made on the basis of intent and founded on the corporate AI ethics statement.

We note in passing that data privacy and the trustworthy stewardship of data is another essential aspect of the journey. While not directly relevant to AI, this is an important issue that poses an ethical risk for the organization and must therefore be kept in mind in any risk mitigation strategy. As seen in several well-popularized cases, this risk goes well beyond regulatory or legal risks [28].

3.4 Decision Support

Most AI models are used for decision making purposes. The AI model usually does not supply the final decision as its output but some numerical quantity that becomes an aspect in the decision making process. This quantity may be a probability, a numerical value, or a categorization. Using this output to generate a decision requires translating the problem into the input data, retrieving the output data and generating a decision, and deploying the model such that it becomes practical. The decision making may be fully automated but this involves pre-processing and post-processing and thus is a larger system than just the AI model [29].

The various available options for the decision must be clearly identified in advance alongside multiple advantages and disadvantages that can be quantified. Furthermore, each of these measures of advantage must be computable so that we can practically determine them in any case. These can be combined into a measure of goodness for each option and so we may arrive at a ranked list with a clear objective numerical assessment. The best option may then be chosen.

This procedure is often not practical, for two reasons: (1) Human teams often find it difficult to quantify any and all advantage measures of all options, to make them computable, and to make them comparable on a single scale so that the ranking becomes linear rather than a matrix, and (2) Many situations have exceptions to any set of such quantifications, which must be dealt with on their own merits. Thus, many decision making processes involve humans who can selectively weigh the options in specific cases and arrive at compromises.

An element that is often ignored by data scientists is the dynamics of the use case. Primarily, we mean two aspects. First, we have the aspect of time where it may take a long time before it becomes apparent if the right decision was taken, e.g. it may take years before we know whether a bank loan decision has resulted in a repaid or a defaulted loan. Second, we have the aspect of repetition in which case the same decision is made multiple times over a long period of time, e.g. medical treatments in which case short-term upsides in cost might result in long-term downsides of outcomes. The measure of goodness and fairness must be carefully tuned to the holistic desired outcome. An intricate example is admittance decision making. Discrimination at school admittance influences university admittance, which influences admittance to the job market, which influences career prospects. The chain starts early and once the odds are against any one group, it is hard to recover later on.

The choices of fairness metrics, use case time-scale, and iterative use are difficult human decisions comparable to our discussion of hidden variables, which must also be identified by a human team well in advance of deployment. There can be no standard default answer but this requires substantial foresight.

The process of converting the AI model output to a decision or a decision-support is the codification of what is usually a human process into software. Human processes have large margins for error because we can consider specific features of the case and deliberate. Software cannot do so. Soft facts or soft rules must be made hard and numeric, or must explicitly be reserved for human-in-the-loop decision making. This is a choice also. These choices are probably best taken on the basis of utility. Measures such as the damage that can be caused in worst case scenarios and the probability of such scenarios occurring can help in determining utility measures that can calculate where it makes sense to automate decision making, where a human is best placed, and where exactly the red line in the sand between computer and human must be drawn.

3.5 Model Lifecycle Management

The accuracy of a model changes over time. This seems strange at first glance as a mathematical formula does not age or corrode. That model was however trained on a dataset that encodes a view of reality, which does age over time. As the world changes, the characteristics of the live data slowly drifts from the characteristics of the training data. There comes a time when the model must be adjusted by including current data in the enlarged or modified training dataset. Depending on the use case, this may be once a year or once a month. Data drift may also occur differently, and at different speeds, in different geographies or markets, which may require the splitting of one model into several new-generation models, one for each of these markets. In order to handle this, models must be continuously observed. It is the AI equivalent of requiring our human physicians to recertify every few years in their chosen specialty.

Observation not only entails gathering the input data that flowed into the model, the output data that the model provided, the decisions that were recommended, the decisions that were actually taken by the human process outside the software system, but – most importantly – the real-world outcome that resulted from all of this. Clearly, observation is complex and requires preparation to be put in place. Once we have it, we can track our progress. Recall that the fundamental reason-for-being of AI models is their capability for easy and cheap automation and scaling. The accuracy performance and ethics performance may now be tracked at scale as well.

At this time, we recall the categorical imperative that says that the maxim of what we do should be such that we can reasonably make it a universal law. By the very nature of AI and its reason for creation, AI has, now that it is deployed at scale, essentially become a universal law! Moreover, that law is largely automated without being able to make exceptions, unless those exceptions are literally codified, i.e. part of the law.

Laws require oversight and if the oversight determines that the law is no longer in the best interest of the population at large, that law must be changed and perhaps even split from federal laws into state laws. That is the purpose of model lifecycle management and the ethics principle of the categorical imperative seems to be its most natural ally.

4      AI Technology Ethics Framework

Having discussed some of the challenges in talking about AI ethics and some philosophical bases, this can be put together into a coherent framework, see figure 3.

1. For the use case, the intention is paramount, and it should be in accordance with our conscience as defined by a corporate value statement. It must also, of course, adhere to the law of the land. In practice, this requires an explicit statement and agreement on what is important to the organization, which in turn requires the formation of a committee that enforces it. The resulting ethical standard must be formulated so as to be practical in deciding on use cases [30].
2. In translating this use case to a precise goal, it is again the intention that should be checked as the calculus of how the use case desiderata are manifest in mathematical key-performance-indicators (KPI) is developed. The KPI must be considered carefully in terms of what they will measure and what they will average out. The practical consequences of false-positives and false-negatives must be taken into account.
3. The various trade-offs must be made explicit, and we seek the golden mean. The main challenge is a variety of hidden variables that must be brought from the shadows into the light. Biases can only be measured and avoided if they are explicitly defined, considered, and brought into the dataset. The organization must therefore define all the hidden variables that it will explicitly look out for, gather data about, and require equitable treatment for.
4. Once the model is ready for decision support, it is the utility that rules its ethics. The greatest good for the greatest number seems a good goal for decision making. However, this presupposes an explicit calculus must be defined and documented!
5. Finally, the lifecycle management that observes the model in practice and provides explainability to the users should obey the categorical imperative. The maxim of what you do – the recommended decision – should be good enough to be used universally by everyone, who fits the relevant profile of the example at hand.

Figure 3: The Ethical AI Framework.

5      Practical Action Items

Theoretical discussions are nice but we now distill it into some practical recommendations that organizations might actually implement to get this done. Why should they do it? Apart from being good global citizens, the practical, economic, and business reason is risk management. Ethical failures, bias, and discrimination can be quite costly and publicly embarrassing for people and organizations, not to mention occasionally illegal. Avoiding this can be seen as an insurance policy, which comes at a price. This is the price …

Call into being an ethics review board that draws up the required ethical baseline documents and goes through these stages with the engineering teams. Many projects are not as linear in their development as described here, but all have these elements in the agile software development process that they enact. Examine each element on its own merits so that all of it makes sense and can be defended.

Make your hidden variables explicit and document everything you decide and the reasons why you decide it. Transparency does not guarantee ethics, but ethics demands transparency. As we mathematicians would say: Transparency is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for ethics.

Finally, it is necessary to reflect on all aspects of the project in detail and to document these reflections for the whole team, future members of the team, management, users of the technology, and the general public.

Skipping these steps is a technical debt that has a high interest rate! Briefly, these are the next steps for any organization that wants to take this seriously:

1.      Form an AI ethics board. This should have data scientists, domain experts, lawyers, business people, and professional ethicists (sometimes called embedded ethics [31]) on it. It should also be sponsored by a C-Level executive and outfitted with authority to make changes to projects and the requirement that all relevant projects be reviewed.

2.      Write an AI ethics statement. This statement should not contain general platitudes but enact specific measurable rules and desiderata on the basis of which projects can be assessed. Terms must be defined. Goals must be quantifiable. Standards must be spelled out in detail. A manual on how to do this is [30].

3.      Assess the use case behind every potential application based on the AI ethics statement. Is the intent in accordance with corporate values?

4.      Assess the AI training loss function, trade-offs, and boundary conditions as well as the AI model goodness assessment criteria by their intent based on the corporate ethics statement. Are we solving for the right thing?

5.      Decide on the various dimensions that the project will demand equity on and define precisely what kind of data must be collected to represent them. Decide on whether this equity will be explicitly required by including it in the AI training loss function, or whether the equity will merely be assessed after training is complete. Implement data governance that collects, secures, and maintains the collected data and meta-data, including the relevant ethical bias variables. Then train seeking the golden mean of all the goals.

6.      Design the post-processing of the model for decision-support in such a way that the decision results in the greatest good for the greatest number. In this design process, spell out precisely and numerically how the good and the number affected are going to be practically measured or calculated. Put into place rules that may or may not be required to make sure that edge cases are properly included in this utility scheme.

7.      Perform model lifecycle management and model observability so that the decision can reasonably hold as a universal law for all cases of the type under consideration in this use case. Think of exceptions to which this may not apply.

8.      Document all these decisions, changes, and reasons for them.

9.      All these actions are to be performed by the ethics board in collaboration with the teams behind the use case, software development, or AI model development. This may seem overly burdensome but there are several significant benefits: (a) the application will be much more likely to serve its true purpose after all this review, (b) the model will be more accurate and address the right issues, (c) the model will not discriminate against any groups that we do not wish to discriminate against, and (d) the risk of public embarrassment or legal action is significantly reduced.

6      Conclusion

Ethics in AI differs from ethics in general because AI is more automated and more scalable than most other processes that pose ethical risks. Investigating ethics in AI is a risk mitigation effort that pays in lowering the risk of negative headlines and legal action. Discrimination against certain groups of people is an important aspect but it is not the only one as the use case to which AI is applied, the manner in which the data is analyzed, the process by which the model output is converted into a decision, and the way the model is maintained over time matter ethically as well. We have presented some of the challenges and a comprehensive framework for thinking about practical solutions alongside some concrete steps to make this happen. The fulcrum of the action items is the formation of a committee that has a mandate to author and implement a corporate AI ethics statement that is concrete, measurable, and detailed.

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks go to a number of valued colleagues who have spent their time to review early drafts of this document and discussed the finer points of ethics with me. All flaws in this essay are mine and many of the ideas are inspired by great conversations with Geoff Keeling (Google), Gayathri Radhakrishnan (Micron Technology), Olivia Gambelin (Ethical Intelligence Associates), Anik Bose (Benhamou Global Ventures, BGV & Ethical AI Governance Group), Bernhardt Trout (MIT), and Anna Felländer (Anch AI). Furthermore, my thank you goes to Evanta, a Gartner Company and the whole team at Gartner for allowing me to present two keynote speeches on this topic to their Chief Data Officer community, which provided very helpful feedback.

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