Why Ethics for Artificial Intelligence? The old, the new and the spurious

Abstract

Our reality, our life, is already configured as a socio-technical system in which we interact with people, devices, data, algorithms, robots. Artificial intelligence, data science and robotics are disruptive technologies that are reconfiguring life. And we already know that technological artifacts incorporate values and have politics. That is why an ethical analysis of these technologies is essential, identifying the hazards we want to avoid and introducing from the very design the values we wish to promote. Not as an end in itself, but to generate citizen trust in the technologies and in the institutions that promote them, to foster their social acceptance and appropriation. Ethics constitutes a powerful tool for the technological empowerment of citizens, preventing algorithmic injustices (discrimination, profiling, biases) and promoting a necessary new “techno-social” contract