Human rights and ethical principles are a key focus of Ireland’s National AI Strategy that forms an integral part of Ireland’s overall digital strategy. The country is making a commitment to ensuring that AI-based systems and solutions developed and used are trustworthy, fair and inclusive¹.
Build a culture of trust
It is imperative to strike the right balance between the financial Return on Investment from AI and enhancing business’ societal license to operate. The purpose should be to devise ways that support and create productive and fulfilling lives for people as organisations accelerate the adoption of AI. The more people start to trust the technology, the more they are likely to embrace it and the easier it would be to exploit AI’s transformative potential in tackling societal, economic and environmental challenges.
Organisations need practical guidance on how to translate high-level ethics principles into verifiable criteria that help shape the design, development, deployment and use of ethical AI. The Council of Europe has identified over 506 documents since 2010 that focus on AI initiatives across Europe with privacy, human rights, transparency, trust, responsibility being the most frequent concepts discussed².
Methods such as design thinking have become very popular in the early phases of an AI lifecycle, ensuring that the project is aligned to a human centric approach. Ethics canvas boards are extremely useful when working on problems that could be classified by low to high-risk AI systems, providing a structured approach and checklist to teams. Outside of tools and methods, some simple measures that can help accelerate good practice and behaviour is having multicultural teams and a gender balance as they bring different values, demeaners, experience, and ideas during the lifecycle of an AI project.
Very soon it will be mandatory for organisations to build ethical guidelines into their AI framework as the European Commission proposes its first-ever legal framework on AI.
Adoption of AI is motivated by trust and for creating a sustained value it is imperative that users have that trust in the AI technology itself or they won’t adopt it.
There are two actions that Irish businesses need to take so that everyone is not just able to contribute to the development of AI but also benefit from it. In order to get started, they must: