Part2: Privacy Talk with Maksim Karliuk, Research specialist at International Development Law Organization: How has UN and UNESCO discussed AI and Ethics until now?
“This interview has been recorded on 18 March 2024 and discusses international organizations, law, technology and ethics”
- What is your current role and research topics at IDLO?
- How has UN and UNESCO discussed AI and Ethics until now?
- What is your current role and research topics at IDLO?
Kohei: Yeah, it’s amazing to hear your experiences and involvement at the beginning of the very important initiative in UNESCO. Currently, you have changed your role to IDLO. It’s more like a law development field as far as I understand. Could you tell us about your current role and research topics of IDLO?
Maksim: Yes, well, IDLO is essentially the only global intergovernmental organization which is exclusively devoted to promoting the rule of law to advance peace and sustainable development.
And my role in this organization is to help in developing knowledge products, essentially, research and policy papers on the issues of the rule of law, access to justice and sustainable development.
I also actively contribute to the management of the research pipeline in the organization and quality control process of the research outputs. So, basically I follow the motto of the organization, which is ‘Creating a culture of justice’ — I try to contribute to creating this culture of justice.
Overall in the organization, there are several cluster topics, which are relevant for research, as well. Those are justice for women and girls, climate justice, criminal justice and anti-corruption, customary and informal justice, inclusive economic development, health law, food security and digital innovation. We are mainly working in developing countries.
I myself have recently been working on the issues of judiciary transformation, anti-corruption, digital rule of law, pretrial detention, and people centered justice more broadly. These are the fields I have been working on recently and the role I have in the organization.
Kohei: That’s quite important to coordinate the international discussion in the law field. It’s brilliant to hear what your experiences are. There are so many discussions about how we can treat AI from an ethical perspective. How has UNESCO discussed AI and ethics until now?
- How has UN and UNESCO discussed AI and Ethics until now?
Maksim: UNESCO has developed this Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, which outlines, establishes a global common ground in this field. It has a set of values and principles with regard to artificial intelligence and ethics of artificial intelligence.
But critically, it goes beyond a declaration of ethical values and principles to include concrete policy actions for their operationalization. The important part of this discussion is maintaining focus on all stages of the AI system lifecycle.
This is crucial because often bias and discrimination, which we know these new technologies can introduce, manifested downstream as experienced by the users, are a product of structural inequalities and exclusions upstream such as the lack of diversity in the management team or technical teams that develop these technologies.
The Recommendation provides very specific ways to operationalize the principles such as transparency, accountability and responsibility in multiple areas: in data privacy, in gender, in environment, in health, education, economy, culture and several other policy areas.
Maybe one thing in particular I would like to highlight is the principle of proportionality in AI ethics, which I helped to develop. In fact, I initially proposed it to be developed, and now it has been reframed as a principle of proportionality and do no harm in this document, and it’s the very first principle in the Recommendation.
The essential idea here is that it is a set of conditions that must be satisfied to justify usage of certain AI methods. This can be further even expanded to justify the use of AI systems as such for particular purposes. The idea is that the use of AI should fit the pursued aims and should not exceed what is necessary to achieve them.
This will require striking a sort of balance between the means and intended aim. These considerations are particularly important in the case of use of data-intensive or resource-intensive AI methods because of their impacts on such concerns as the environment, data bias, privacy, explainability, transparency and several others.
In fact, there is research that shows that, in certain contexts, simple explainable algorithms often have close to the same predictive power as black box methods like deep learning, for example.
In such scenarios, the added benefit of the black box techniques is not worth the big cost of interpretability. Beyond that, in certain scenarios, use of algorithms can provide no additional value whatsoever.
That’s why when deciding whether to choose an AI tool, or which tool in particular to use, we have to make this assessment and do this balancing act.
Now, as I was saying, this document is being implemented in practice in the real world and there are several tools that have been developed as part of this Recommendation.
One of them is readiness assessment methodology, the other one is ethical impact assessment, which are core pillars of the implementation. These tools aim to assess and promote the resilience of existing laws, policies and institutions to AI implementation in countries as well as the alignment with the values and principles set out in the Recommendation.
And in fact, it’s not only for states, because the ethical impact assessment has been designed in a way that it can also be used by the private sector as well.
There is even a Business Council for ethics of AI now, which is a collaborative initiative between UNESCO and companies who develop or use AI in various sectors. Currently it is co-chaired as far as I remember by Microsoft and Telefonica, several others are also there.
There are some other initiatives as well, which are part of this implementation process. But beyond UNESCO, of course, it’s a big topic within the whole UN system. In fact, when we developed this Recommendation, we consulted with all major UN agencies who provided their inputs into this document.
Recently, also the Office of the Secretary General’s Envoy on Technology has created the High Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence. The task of this body is to analyze and advance recommendations for international governance of artificial intelligence.
（Movie: UN Chief on launching the Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence (26 Oct 2023) | United Nations）
Recently, they have published an Interim Report on Governance of AI for Humanity, which calls for a closer alignment between international norms and how AI is developed and rolled out.
The central piece of this report is a proposal to strengthen international governance of AI by carrying out critical functions such as horizon scanning for risks, supporting international collaboration on data, computing capacity and essentially to reach the Sustainable Development Goals. It also has some recommendations to enhance accountability and ensure an equitable voice to all countries in the world.
They will develop the final report by the end of the year, even earlier, because in September this year, there will be the Summit of the Future, which is a UN-wide initiative that will bring together world leaders together to forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future, focusing on transforming the ‘what’ into ‘how’ to do it.
The aim is to accelerate efforts to meet our existing international commitments and take concrete steps to respond to emerging challenges and opportunities, such as AI and its benefits and risks. In the end, a Pact for the Future will be adopted, and part of it will also be on new technologies, on AI in particular.
My hope is that it will come up with ways to strengthen oversight mechanisms for the use of data driven technologies, such as artificial intelligence, but at the global level.
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