Recently, the European Commission issued artificial intelligence ethics guidelines, which list seven key conditions for "trustworthy artificial intelligence" - human agency and supervisory capabilities, security, private data management, transparency, inclusiveness, social well-being, and accountability mechanisms to ensure that artificial intelligence is sufficiently safe and reliable.

In fact, although people have different opinions on where artificial intelligence will go in the future, it has become a basic consensus to impose ethical regulations on artificial intelligence.

"In the era of artificial intelligence, big data, and 5G, it is necessary to make advanced technologies better serve people, and it is necessary to establish guidelines and regulations." Cui Dongshu, secretary-general of the National Passenger Car Market Information Joint Association, said. This should be said to be a "reassurance" for both technology research and development based on artificial intelligence and industrial development.

Countries around the world are actively introducing ethical rules for artificial intelligence

June 2016

Ethics Committee of Japan Artificial Intelligence Society

A draft ethical outline for researchers was prepared. The draft raises the possibility of AI bringing harm to human society and requires measures to eliminate threats and prevent malicious use.

September 2016

British Standards Industry Association

The industry's first public indicator on the ethical design of robots, namely the "Guidelines for the Ethical Design and Application of Robots and Machine Systems", was released to ensure that intelligent robots produced by humans can integrate into the ethics of human society.

September 2016

Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization

Five major technology giants including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM announced the establishment of a non-profit organization. One of the goals is to provide a model for AI research in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity.

November 2016

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Released the world's first "Artificial Intelligence Ethics Code Design Draft ( )". It hopes to use this document to help the technology industry create AI automated systems that can benefit mankind and change the idea that there is no need to worry about moral ethics.

January 2017

Al Conference in Asilomar, CA

Nearly a thousand experts in artificial intelligence-related fields jointly signed the famous "Asilomar 23 Principles of Artificial Intelligence."

November 2017

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Three new ethical standards for artificial intelligence were announced: ethically driven standards for machineized systems, intelligent systems and automated systems, fail-safe design standards for automated and semi-autonomous systems, and well-being measures for ethical AI and automated systems.

April 2018

European Commission

Released the "EU Artificial Intelligence" document, proposing the EU path for artificial intelligence. Among them, establishing an appropriate ethical and legal framework is one of a three-pronged approach to developing artificial intelligence.

April 2018

UK House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence

The report states that in the process of developing and applying artificial intelligence, it is necessary to put ethics and morality at the core to ensure that this technology can better benefit mankind.

April 2019

European Commission

The official version of the "Ethical Principles for Trustworthy AI (for AI)" was released, proposing a framework for realizing the full life cycle of trustworthy artificial intelligence.

Data comes from Global Technology Map

What ethical challenges will artificial intelligence bring?

In the report "Future Cornerstone - The Social Role and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence" released by the China Development Research Foundation, it was pointed out that from a humanistic perspective, artificial intelligence has brought about some fundamental problems that are already happening or are about to happen, and may shake the foundation of our society.

With the continuous development of artificial intelligence, our understanding of people is becoming more and more materialized and de-meaningful, and the boundary between humans and machines is becoming increasingly blurred. We need to think about the consequences of this blurred boundary. How should we treat the relationship between machines and ourselves? Should humans and machines be integrated? If people's feelings of pleasure and pain can be satisfied through other physical and chemical means, then do people still have the need and motivation to participate in social interaction?

Artificial intelligence also brings new social power structure issues. With the help of artificial intelligence, companies can give each user a large number of data labels and understand people's preferences and behaviors based on these labels, even better than users know themselves. This is a huge power asymmetry.

Furthermore, artificial intelligence may lead to the reinforcement of biases. In social media, artificial intelligence recommends people with similar views to each other, and news feeds often have path dependence. When people's sources of information become more and more dependent on intelligent machines, biases will be strengthened in this assimilation and path dependence.

Artificial intelligence has also greatly amplified society's information and knowledge processing capabilities, and the redundancy of information and knowledge has put people in a dilemma of choice. If the number and scope of human participation in social interactions shrinks, and artificial intelligence becomes more and more involved in the production of knowledge, the relationship between knowledge and human needs will become more and more indirect, and may even dominate human needs in turn.

Although artificial intelligence will also promote further specialization and create new job opportunities, not everyone has the ability to overcome technical and social barriers. Yuval Harari warned in "A Brief History of the Future" that a "useless class" may appear in future society. This worry is not entirely unfounded.

In addition, artificial intelligence also poses challenges to traditional laws, regulations and social norms. For example, once an accident occurs in a driverless car, should we attribute the blame to the company that developed the product, the product owner, or the artificial intelligence product itself?

How to construct ethical norms for artificial intelligence

Currently, some leading artificial intelligence companies are paying attention to ethical issues in the development and application of artificial intelligence.

Microsoft President Shibold said that to design trustworthy artificial intelligence, solutions that embody ethical principles must be adopted. Therefore, Microsoft proposed six basic ethical principles: fairness, inclusiveness, transparency, accountability, reliability and security, privacy and confidentiality.

Google also stated that in the development and application of artificial intelligence, it adheres to seven principles including fairness, security, transparency, and privacy protection, and clearly lists AI applications that Google "will not pursue."

The report believes that forward-looking exploration by these companies is very important. However, considering the far-reaching impact of artificial intelligence on future society, it is also necessary for the whole society and governments to work together to formulate ethical norms and policy directions for the development and application of artificial intelligence to lay the foundation for its future healthy development.

To this end, the report puts forward a series of recommendations -

Social level: Universities and research institutions carry out forward-looking research on science and technology ethics to provide theoretical support for the establishment of relevant norms and systems; artificial intelligence companies should incorporate ethical considerations into the corporate social responsibility framework; investment institutions should incorporate ethical issues into the ESG (environmental, social and governance) framework to guide companies to develop responsible artificial intelligence products; social organizations can promote the construction of artificial intelligence ethical norms through training, publishing ethics assessment reports, summarizing representative cases, etc.

Public policy level: Policies for artificial intelligence research and development and application should put people at the core, meet the needs of all-round human development, and promote social equity and sustainable development; the government needs to set up special funds to support universities and research institutions to carry out ethical research on cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence; give priority to encouraging the application of artificial intelligence to solve problems in the social field Highlighted challenges include reducing poverty and inequality, promoting the integration of disadvantaged groups into society and participating in social development processes; an artificial intelligence ethics committee composed of government departments and industry experts should be formed to provide ethical guidance for the development and application of artificial intelligence, and conduct ethics and legality assessments of artificial intelligence products with significant public impact.

International level: Xue Lan, Dean of the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University, said, "The development of artificial intelligence will have a profound impact on the current international order in three aspects: innovative governance, sustainable development, and global security cooperation. Governments and all sectors of society need to pay attention to and respond from the perspective of a community with a shared future for mankind. Only by strengthening cooperation and exchanges between countries can we truly build a new global order for artificial intelligence governance that is co-constructed and shared, safe, efficient, and sustainable."

The report also recommends that governments should promote data sharing technology and provide shared public data sets for artificial intelligence training and testing. On the premise that personal information is protected, the free flow of data should be promoted, international cooperation should be strengthened, and a multi-level international artificial intelligence governance mechanism should be established. Governments of various countries should incorporate the development of artificial intelligence into the international cooperation agenda through the United Nations, the G20 and other international platforms, and use artificial intelligence to promote the realization of the United Nations' 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

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