Three Kinds of AI Ethics
This work addresses the problem of disorganization in AI ethics for researchers and practitioners, offering a foundational taxonomy to guide future work, though it is incremental in nature.
The paper tackles the chaotic growth of AI ethics literature by characterizing it into three distinct kinds—ethics and AI, ethics in AI, and ethics of AI—to clarify research questions, methods, and required expertise, thereby providing a framework for more systematic discussions.
There is an overwhelming abundance of works in AI Ethics. This growth is chaotic because of how sudden it is, its volume, and its multidisciplinary nature. This makes difficult to keep track of debates, and to systematically characterize goals, research questions, methods, and expertise required by AI ethicists. In this article, I show that the relation between AI and ethics can be characterized in at least three ways, which correspond to three well-represented kinds of AI ethics: ethics and AI; ethics in AI; ethics of AI. I elucidate the features of these three kinds of AI Ethics, characterize their research questions, and identify the kind of expertise that each kind needs. I also show how certain criticisms to AI ethics are misplaced, as being done from the point of view of one kind of AI ethics, to another kind with different goals. All in all, this work sheds light on the nature of AI ethics, and sets the groundwork for more informed discussions about the scope, methods, and training of AI ethicists.