Artificial Intelligence

Historical Moment in AI Ethics: First-Ever Global Agreement in United Nations

Why UNESCO warns of AI technology bringing unprecedented challenges to humanity

Ethics in artificial intelligence

Ethics in artificial intelligence is a global matter. It seriously concerns thought leaders in the field in various countries. While politicians and AI entrepreneurs seem to pay less attention to ethical issues, some international organizations have already sensed the severity of the situation and started taking necessary measures.

It is a piece of admirable news that UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) significantly cares about ethics in artificial intelligence. The organization adopted a comprehensive global standard-setting instrument to provide AI with a solid ethical basis on 24 November 2021.

The standards aim to protect and promote human rights and human dignity. According to UNESCO, they will be an ethical guiding compass and a global normative bedrock, allowing us to build of strong respect for the rule of law in the digital world.

From a historical perspective, UNESCO embarked on a two-year process to elaborate this first global standard-setting instrument on the ethics of artificial intelligence in the form of a recommendation. It followed the decision of its General Conference at the 40th session in November 2019.

In 2020, the focus of UNESCO was on preparing the draft text for the recommendation with the assistance of an ad hoc expert group. The organization included a multidisciplinary consultation approach with various stakeholders during this period. These consultations became essential to ensure that the content would be inclusive.

In the recent general conference of UNESCO, the focus was on an intergovernmental process and negotiations on the draft content to produce a final version of the recommendation for possible adoption. The excellent news is that UNESCO plans to support its 193 member states in its implementation and ask them to report their progress and practices regularly.

To give you a context, I want to outline three significant health, safety, and privacy perspectives for the situation of AI ethics in the global landscape:

1 — Here is UNESCO’s perspective: “We see increased gender and ethnic bias, significant threats to privacy, dignity, and agency, dangers of mass surveillance, and increased use of unreliable Artificial Intelligence technologies in law enforcement, to name a few. Yet, until now, there were no universal standards to provide an answer to these issues”.

2 — According to the head of the United Nations health agency, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds enormous potential for improving the health of millions around the world if ethics and human rights are at the heart of its design, deployment, and use”.

3 — According to WHO (World Health Organization), “opportunities and risks are linked and cautions about the unethical collection and use of health data, biases encoded in algorithms, and risks to patient safety, cybersecurity, and the environment. Moreover, systems trained primarily on data collected from individuals in high-income countries may not perform well for individuals in low- and middle-income settings.”

UNESCO studies identify that no global instrument currently covers all the fields that guide the development and application of AI in a human-centered approach. Here is the link to the preliminary study on the ethics of artificial intelligence by UNESCO.

The organization has an advisory body called COMEST (World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology). The advisory board has 18 scholars from scientific, legal, philosophical, cultural, and political disciplines from various regions. The Director-General appoints them for science programs and the global science communities of UNESCO.

The advisory board will formulate ethical principles to provide decision-makers with criteria that extend beyond economic considerations. I am glad that the economy is not a single focus in this plan. You can access the report, structure, references, and other details at this link.

You can access UNESCO’s work on the recommendation building on the preliminary study on ethics of artificial intelligence of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). In addition, COMEST has been closely working with the International Bioethics Committee (IBC) since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a nutshell, the acronym of ROAMX captures UNESCO’s approach to AI ethics: Rights, Openness, Access to All Multistakeholder participation, and Cross-Cutting Issues. You can learn more from this video on UNESCO YouTube.

Why Ethics Matter for Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) affects us in all walks of life, including physical health, mental health, safety, and privacy, as the most significant concerns for human beings.

AI technology, process, and tools are rapidly growing globally. Even though some countries have governance bodies, these AI technology processes and tools are not regulated in many countries. Some crazy ideas turn into products and services offered to the public in a rush to gain economic advantage.

Technologists and entrepreneurs mainly pay attention to design, development, and deployment activities to get the best outcome for their organizations. We know that the competition is severe among AI service providers and even among some leading companies. Ethics remain secondary in these competitive environments.

As I pointed out in previous articles, China and the United States are allocating significant resources to win the race on a global scale for an AI revolution expected to happen in 2030. Both countries made notable progress by investing in the development of AI technologies by business and research organizations. Several other developed countries are also making a momentous investment in AI technologies.

Since these development activities transpire at a frenetic pace using agile methods, outstanding progress has been made in the proliferation of technologies. New use cases are captured and developed, giving hope to people. However, the ethical aspects of these technologies are usually neglected or overlooked in the process.

Even though some ethical concerns for the future are discussed in some communities, and some of them might not apply to the current technological progress, AI’s future certainly requires serious ethical and regulatory considerations and actions as some developmental activities can affect humanity on a massive scale.

The problem with current AI development is the lack of control. There is no central control mechanism. Developers are creating trillions of lines of computer code written in various languages.

Reviewing these extensive codes for AI applications is difficult because they are propriety mainly owned by the private sector. The algorithms might have hidden biases against different people. AI can even be racist as I pointed in this article. In addition, AI applications have started writing their own code, which makes it more difficult to control.

As mentioned in my previous posts, once AI systems start working in concert as sophisticated GANs (generative adversarial networks), the advancement can outpace human capability to foresee what must be regulated for the public good.

When emerging technologies rapidly grow with no regulations, we lose control. For example, I shared my concerns about Deep Fake technologies and their misuse in a recent story. Unfortunately, we witnessed this situation in social networks, which has already caused humanity serious concerns even though some people considered it innocent and fun.

We can currently control primitive AI systems and immature robots. However, some systems, especially using self-learning and autonomous algorithms using cognitive computing frameworks and capabilities, have started outsmarting humans in various areas. These systems can learn faster and process more information than humans and at a faster speed.

If sophisticated AI code and algorithms get into the hands of people with malicious ambitions, the scale of damage can affect humanity badly. Moreover, the power of the Internet can significantly spread dangerous codes among such communities with wrong motives. This unwanted power can harm humankind.

As mentioned in various articles, quantum computing is also increasing its power and is expected to become mainstream in a few years. Many business and government organizations heavily invest in developing quantum hardware and software. Quantum computing can make AI technology more complex and more difficult to control.

Another concern relates to biotechnology and recent development in IoT (Internet of Things) and IoB (Internet of Bodies), as I discussed in this article: The Internet of Bodies (IoB) — Who Wants Their Body on the Internet.

Biotechnology is used in healthcare safely to some extent. Some healthcare professionals are using them for patients via secure channels. However, the integration of these devices with AI and the Internet ecosystem can bring more ethical issues. Both biotechnology and AI technologies are prone to human errors. Therefore, we need to integrate biotechnology with AI tools ethically with precise regulations.

Conclusions

Due to rapid developments in AI technologies and lessons learned from other technologies from past events, we need to develop ethical rules for AI technologies as recommended by UNESCO.

We know that AI ethics and regulations do not just belong to a specific business organization or a country anymore. These concerns relate to all nations. We are all connected in cyberspace. There are no national boundaries on the Internet.

Humanity faces many biological and environmental problems in addition to hindering constraints in our nature. We are vulnerable due to the challenges of our aging bodies and changing ecological conditions.

Technology and science are key human capabilities to overcome these challenges. Therefore, ethical and regulatory aspects of emerging technologies are critical requirements for our health, safety, privacy, security, and well-being. It is promising that UNESCO understands these concerns and has started taking protective and preventative measures.

Thank you for reading my perspectives.

Related Articles

Artificial Intelligence Does Not Concern Me, but Artificial Super-Intelligence Frightens Me

Why Integrate Biotechnology & Information Technology Ethically for Optimal Outcomes

Time to Re-Examine Deep Fake Technologies with Firmer Measures

The Internet of Bodies (IoB) — Who Wants Their Body on the Internet

Practical Use of Artificial Intelligence in Oncology & Genetics

How Misuse of Technology Damages Our Physical and Mental Health

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