What Buddhism can do for AI ethics; MIT Technology Review, January 6, 2021

• Soraj Hongladaromarchive page

, MIT Technology Review ; What Buddhism can do for AI ethics

"The explosive growth of artificial intelligence has fostered hope that it will help us solve many of the world’s most intractable problems. However, there’s also much concern about the power of AI, and growing agreement that its use should be guided to avoid infringing upon our rights.

Many groups have discussed and proposed ethical guidelines for how AI should be developed or deployed: IEEE, a global professional organization for engineers, has issued a 280-page document on the subject (to which I contributed), and the European Union has published its own framework. The AI Ethics Guidelines Global Inventory has compiled more than 160 such guidelines from around the world.

Unfortunately, most of these guidelines are developed by groups or organizations concentrated in North America and Europe: a survey published by social scientist Anna Jobin and her colleagues found 21 in the US, 19 in the EU, 13 in the UK, four in Japan, and one each from the United Arab Emirates, India, Singapore, and South Korea.

Guidelines reflect the values of the people who issue them. That most AI ethics guidelines are being written in Western countries means that the field is dominated by Western values such as respect for autonomy and the rights of individuals, especially since the few guidelines issued in other countries mostly reflect those in the West.

Guidelines written in different countries may be similar because some values are indeed universal. However, for these guidelines to truly reflect the perspectives of people in non-Western countries, they would need to represent the traditional value systems found in each culture as well."