Ethics By Design: Steps To Prepare For AI Rules Changes; Forbes, October 21, 2021

Ursula Morgenstern, Forbes; Ethics By Design: Steps To Prepare For AI Rules Changes

"Ethics by design is a different way of thinking for companies. In addition to considering profit-driven outcomes, companies will now need to assess the harm and impact of their practices and provide oversight to manage AI’s risks. 

The AI Act sets the stage for change. Proposed in April, the legislation aims at mitigating the harmful use of AI. It facilitates the transparent, ethical use of AI — and keeps machine intelligence under human control. The regulations would outlaw four AI technologies that cause physical and psychological harm: social scoring, dark-pattern AI, manipulation and real-time biometric identification systems. 

Equally important to companies are the act’s proposed penalties. Fines for noncompliance are significantly higher than those for the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ranging up to 30 million Euros, or 6% of annual revenue. In contrast, the GDPR imposesfines of up to 20 million Euros or 4% of revenue."

If AI is going to help us in a crisis, we need a new kind of ethics; MIT Technology Review, June 24, 2020

Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review; If AI is going to help us in a crisis, we need a new kind of ethics

Ethics for urgency means making ethics a core part of AI rather than an afterthought, says Jess Whittlestone.

"What needs to change?

We need to think about ethics differently. It shouldn’t be something that happens on the side or afterwards—something that slows you down. It should simply be part of how we build these systems in the first place: ethics by design...

You’ve said that we need people with technical expertise at all levels of AI design and use. Why is that?

I’m not saying that technical expertise is the be-all and end-all of ethics, but it’s a perspective that needs to be represented. And I don’t want to sound like I’m saying all the responsibility is on researchers, because a lot of the important decisions about how AI gets used are made further up the chain, by industry or by governments.

But I worry that the people who are making those decisions don’t always fully understand the ways it might go wrong. So you need to involve people with technical expertise. Our intuitions about what AI can and can’t do are not very reliable.

What you need at all levels of AI development are people who really understand the details of machine learning to work with people who really understand ethics. Interdisciplinary collaboration is hard, however. People with different areas of expertise often talk about things in different ways. What a machine-learning researcher means by privacy may be very different from what a lawyer means by privacy, and you can end up with people talking past each other. That’s why it’s important for these different groups to get used to working together."

Developers - it's time to brush up on your philosophy: Ethical AI is the big new thing in tech; ZDNet, April 1, 2020

 Daphne Leprince-Ringuet , ZDNet; Developers - it's time to brush up on your philosophy: Ethical AI is the big new thing in tech

The transformative potential of algorithms means that developers are now expected to think about the ethics of technology -- and that wasn't part of the job description.

"Crucially, most guidelines also insist that thought be given to the ethical implications of the technology from the very first stage of conceptualising a new tool, and all the way through its implementation and commercialisation. 

This principle of 'ethics by design' goes hand in hand with that of responsibility and can be translated, roughly, as: 'coders be warned'. In other words, it's now on developers and their teams to make sure that their program doesn't harm users. And the only way to make sure it doesn't is to make the AI ethical from day one.

The trouble with the concept of ethics by design, is that tech wasn't necessarily designed for ethics."