10 learnings from considering AI Ethics through global perspectives


Blog by Sampriti Saxena and Stefaan G. Verhulst: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have the potential to solve the world’s biggest challenges. However, they also come with certain risks to individuals and groups. As these technologies become more prevalent around the world, we need to consider the ethical ramifications of AI use to identify and rectify potential harms. Equally, we need to consider the various associated issues from a global perspective, not assuming that a single approach will satisfy different cultural and societal expectations.

In February 2021, The Governance Lab (The GovLab), the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, the Global AI Ethics Consortium (GAIEC), the Center for Responsible AI @ NYU (R/AI), and the Technical University of Munich’s (TUM) Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (IEAI) launched AI Ethics: Global Perspectives. …A year and a half later, the course has grown to 38 modules, contributed by 40 faculty members representing over 20 countries. Our conversations with faculty members and our experiences with the course modules have yielded a wealth of knowledge about AI ethics. In keeping with the values of openness and transparency that underlie the course, we summarized these insights into ten learnings to share with a broader audience. In what follows, we outline our key lessons from experts around the world.

Our Ten Learnings:

  1. Broaden the Conversation
  2. The Public as a Stakeholder
  3. Centering Diversity and Inclusion in Ethics
  4. Building Effective Systems of Accountability
  5. Establishing Trust
  6. Ask the Right Questions
  7. The Role of Independent Research
  8. Humans at the Center
  9. Our Shared Responsibility
  10. The Challenge and Potential for a Global Framework…(More)”.