Ethics in artificial intelligence: introduction to the special issue

Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have generated a steep interest from media and general public. As AI systems (e.g. robots, chatbots, avatars and other intelligent agents) are moving from being perceived as a tool to being perceived as autonomous agents and team-mates, an important focus of research and development is understanding the ethical impact of these systems. What does it mean for an AI system to make a decision? What are the moral, societal and legal consequences of their actions and decisions? Can an AI system be held accountable for its actions? How can these systems be controlled once their learning capabilities bring them into states that are possibly only remotely linked to their initial, designed, setup? Should such autonomous innovation in commercial systems even be allowed, and how should use and development be regulated? These and many other related questions are currently the focus of much attention. The way society and our systems will be able to deal with these questions will for a large part determine our level of trust, and ultimately, the impact of AI in society, and the existence of AI. Contrary to the frightening images of a dystopic future in media and popular fiction, where AI systems dominate the world and is mostly concerned with warfare, AI is already changing our daily lives mostly in ways that improve human health, safety, and productivity (Stone et al. 2016). This is the case in domain such as transportation; service robots; health-care; education; public safety and security; and entertainment. Nevertheless, and in order to ensure that those dystopic futures do not become reality, these systems must be introduced in ways that build trust and understanding, and respect human and civil rights. The need for ethical considerations in the development of intelligent interactive systems is becoming one of the main influential areas of research in the last few years, and has led to several initiatives both from researchers as from practitioners, including the IEEE initiative on Ethics of Autonomous Systems1, the Foundation for Responsible Robotics2, and the Partnership on AI3 amongst several others. As the capabilities for autonomous decision making grow, perhaps the most important issue to consider is the need to rethink responsibility (Dignum 2017). Whatever their level of autonomy and social awareness and their ability to learn, AI systems are artefacts, constructed by people to fulfil some goals. Theories, methods, algorithms are needed to integrate societal, legal and moral values into technological developments in AI, at all stages of development (analysis, design, construction, deployment and evaluation). These frameworks must deal both with the autonomic reasoning of the machine about such issues that we consider to have ethical impact, but most importantly, we need frameworks to guide design choices, to regulate the reaches of AI systems, to ensure proper data stewardship, and to help individuals determine their own involvement. Values are dependent on the socio-cultural context (Turiel 2002), and are often only implicit in deliberation processes, which means that methodologies are needed to elicit the values held by all the stakeholders, and to make these explicit can lead to better understanding and trust on artificial autonomous systems. That is, AI reasoning should be able to take into account societal values, moral and ethical considerations; weigh the respective priorities of values held by different stakeholders in various multicultural contexts; explain its reasoning; and guarantee transparency. Responsible Artificial Intelligence is about human responsibility for the development of intelligent systems along fundamental human principles and values, to ensure human flourishing and wellbeing in a sustainable world. In fact, Responsible AI is more than the ticking of some ethical ‘boxes’ in a report, or the development of some add-on features, or switch-off buttons in AI systems. Rather, responsibility is fundamental