Are You Worthy of My Trust?: A Socioethical Perspective on the Impacts of Trustworthy AI Systems on the Environment and Human Society
This work addresses the socioethical concerns of AI for society and the environment, but it is incremental as it provides a high-level overview without new empirical data.
The paper tackles the problem of assessing the societal and environmental impacts of AI systems, arguing for a multi-disciplinary approach to governance and highlighting risks like energy consumption and carbon footprint to enable trustworthy AI.
With ubiquitous exposure of AI systems today, we believe AI development requires crucial considerations to be deemed trustworthy. While the potential of AI systems is bountiful, though, is still unknown-as are their risks. In this work, we offer a brief, high-level overview of societal impacts of AI systems. To do so, we highlight the requirement of multi-disciplinary governance and convergence throughout its lifecycle via critical systemic examinations (e.g., energy consumption), and later discuss induced effects on the environment (i.e., carbon footprint) and its users (i.e., social development). In particular, we consider these impacts from a multi-disciplinary perspective: computer science, sociology, environmental science, and so on to discuss its inter-connected societal risks and inability to simultaneously satisfy aspects of well-being. Therefore, we accentuate the necessity of holistically addressing pressing concerns of AI systems from a socioethical impact assessment perspective to explicate its harmful societal effects to truly enable humanity-centered Trustworthy AI.