The European Commission has just published its draft Regulation on Artificial Intelligence (AI). While there’s no obligation for UK law to follow suit, the Regulation provides a helpful guide to risk from different applications of AI, and the sort of controls that might be required. What “AI” is covered? According to Article 3(1) [with sub-clauses […]
Tag: Ethics
Posts relating to “ethics”, in the sense of guiding principles that we should follow, even though they are not legal requirements
One striking aspect of the new Ethical Framework for AI in Education is how little of it is actually about AI technology. The Framework has nine objectives and 33 criteria: 18 of these apply to the ‘pre-procurement’ stage, and another five to ‘monitoring and evaluation’. That’s a refreshing change from the usual technology-led discussions in […]
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Towards Ethical AI
My Digifest talk yesterday developed a couple of ideas on how we might move Towards Ethical AI, at least as that is defined by the EU High-Level Experts Group. First is that three of the HLEG’s four Principles, and at least five of their seven Requirements, look strikingly similar to the requirements when processing personal […]
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Where is “AI ethics”?
One of the trickiest questions I’m being asked at the moment is about “the ethics of Artificial Intelligence”. Not, I think, because it is necessarily a hard question, but because it’s so ill-defined. Indeed a couple of discussions at Digifest yesterday made me wonder whether it’s the simply the wrong question to start with. First, […]
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Beyond the Future of Assessment?
A fascinating discussion session with colleagues who worked on Jisc’s “Future of Assessment” report. When that was written, in the first months of 2020, its intention was to look at how things might change over the next five years. Little did we know… When the pandemic hit, suddenly many of things we had expected to […]
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Think “Big benefits”, not “Big Data”
“Big Data” has – often rightly – had a bad press. Is there a better way to think about it? Starting from potential benefits and discussing how they might be achieved should help us choose the right outcomes to aim for when using data, make it more likely that those aims will be delivered, and […]
It seems easy to come up with new ways we might re-use data we already have. But harder to work out, in advance, whether an idea is likely to be perceived as unethical, intrusive, or just creepy. In a recent paper – “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (of Data)” – I explored […]
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Using Social Media: is it ethical?
In a chat at the DataMatters conference I was asked about the ethics of universities and colleges using social media providers to contact students. In breaking down that question, I think it illustrates a continuum: the more we interfere with individuals’ own choices of what and how to use, the more thinking we need to […]
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Sandbox Tales: Machine Learning
The latest reports from the ICO sandbox provide important clarification of how data protection law applies to, and can guide, the application of novel technologies. This post looks at machine learning… Onfido’s engagement looked at how to train and review the performance of machine learning models. In thinking about that I’d concluded that the GDPR […]
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Working with non-human intelligence
Today’s expert panel on Data Ethics took a fascinating turn: to consider what a healthy relationship between human and AI would look like. Although we tend to discuss characteristics and affordances of technology, proper use of technology depends on the human side of the partnership, too. When choosing or using any tool that uses AI, […]