Governance AI Ethics

During the next years, artificial intelligence (AI) will penetrate into practical everyday life. AI will be applied in numerous social domains. One of these domains is ethical governance. The core question relates to how to develop ethically and legally valid norms for applying AI technologies in governing social practices. Where and how can AI be applied when innovating new ways of governing societal problems?

Numerous routine actions shall be renewed by increasingly intelligent technologies, which

will have multifarious social implications. In order to successfully develop intelligent societies, it is important to combine very different types of expertise from technology to social research to reach common goals. In this issue we shall present a multidisciplinary and holistic view to the problems of developing ethical governance in AI societies. 

Due to the particular nature of AI technology - that of an information rich, networked, interactional and dynamic sea of data learning, designed to replace and enhance human cognitive and physical abilities – numerous ethical questions come into place. These ethical considerations stem right from the sources of AI, and machine learning, to its algorithmic logic and socio-economic dynamics within human societies. Recent years have seen AI ethics form into a rapidly emerging and expanding topic in academic, industrial and policy circles. From a governmental department perspective for instance, AI shall replace people in administrative processes. There is no longer the need for people to read and process every document received. Many tasks shall change their current form as machines can improve the present administrative processes.  

It is apparent that we need new approaches, methodologies, and processes to govern and steer the utilization of AI in both the public and private sectors. This is a multifarious governance challenge across various social and administrational sectors. It is also a challenge for adopting appropriate and effective system design practices to create desired, acceptable and powerful systems. In particular, governing the development and application of AI systems requires multidisciplinary expertise and new methods as well as practices.

This Research Topic utilises multidisciplinary research expertise to address a number of central issues concerning AI, societal governance with AI, and governance of AI development and implantation. As such, the included articles cover insight from technical solutions, as well as risks and errors in design and development, to law and social governance. In this article collection insight from social ethics, technology and innovation, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies and sociology comes together to represent ethics and AI governance.