Beyond Principles: A Process for Responsible Tech

Meet the new design process: An upgrade with ethics & digital wellbeing baked in.

In the frenzied quest to keep a moral handle on AI, dozens of groups have organized the collaborative creation of ethical principles. From the Asilomar AI Principles to the IEEEs Ethically-aligned design specification, to the individual efforts of companies like Google and Microsoft to set their philosophical leanings onto paper. We are awash in principles.

While principles are essential, many tech makers are frustrated by how little help they provide in actual practice. Principles must be sufficiently abstract to retain truth across contexts, but this abstraction also leaves them too vague to be useful for specific design decisions on their own.

For example, Microsoft sensibly states “AI systems should treat all people fairly” but what is fair? Is affirmative action fair? Is it fair to violate the rights of an individual on behalf of the many? Anand Rao and Ilana Golbin of PwC point to the fact that “There are at least 20 mathematical definitions of fairness, and when we choose one, we violate some aspect of the others. In other words, it is impossible for every decision to be fair to all parties.” So how exactly might we go about using a principle like this to make a design decision?