The Role of Normware in Trustworthy and Explainable AI
This is a conceptual position paper that addresses societal issues in AI, but it is incremental as it reorganizes existing ideas without new empirical results.
The paper tackles the challenge of making AI trustworthy and explainable by proposing normware as a distinct computational artifact for specifying norms, arguing that it is irreducible to software due to its ecological role in decision-making.
For being potentially destructive, in practice incomprehensible and for the most unintelligible, contemporary technology is setting high challenges on our society. New conception methods are urgently required. Reorganizing ideas and discussions presented in AI and related fields, this position paper aims to highlight the importance of normware--that is, computational artifacts specifying norms--with respect to these issues, and argues for its irreducibility with respect to software by making explicit its neglected ecological dimension in the decision-making cycle.