Council on AI ethics formed to balance innovation with human dignity

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) launched a council on artificial intelligence (AI) ethics to help ensure technological innovation promotes human dignity.

Inspired by the President’s Council on Bioethics, the council’s “purpose will be to provide practical resources that aim to balance innovation with prudence, freedom with responsibility, and ensure technological capability promotes human dignity,” Anthony Mills, director for the Center for Technology, Science, and Energy at AEI, said at a launch event for the council on Feb. 23.

AEI is a public policy think tank “dedicated to defending human dignity, expanding human potential, and building a freer and safer world,” according to the organization’s website.

Mills will lead the council made up of an interdisciplinary team who “come from a diverse array of institutions and work out of a range of differing, sometimes opposing, philosophical traditions: secular, religious, liberal, conservative, or other,” Mills said.

The council’s membership includes Brian Boyd, a Roman Catholic theologian who is director for the Center for Ethics and Economic Justice at Loyola University New Orleans.

The “goal is not to forge artificial consensus but to create a forum in which to examine and debate the ethical demands of our moment,” Mills said. “In a pluralistic and deeply divided society, consensus is not always achievable or even desirable, and we welcome dissent in order to create space for genuine moral inquiry and embrace the complexity of ethical questions that resist easy answers,” he said.

While inspired by the President’s Council on Bioethics, AEI’s council does have differing aspects. Mills said: “Our intended audience includes but is not limited to lawmakers and technical experts, and our focus is not only on the applications of AI, but specialist domains such as science and medicine, important as these are.”

“We are equally concerned with the ethical issues raised by the development and deployment of AI in a vast range of societal contexts, and hope that our work can provide useful resources not only to doctors, scientists, and federal policymakers but also to business leaders, parents, teachers, community leaders, and all those who are grappling day to day with the challenges and opportunities posed by this transformative technology,” Mills said.

‘A future that’s ordered to the goods of our nature’

Boyd and other council members participated in a panel moderated by Luke Burgis, founder and director of Cluny Institute, that included panelists Matthew Crawford, senior fellow at Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture; and Nita Farahany, professor at Duke Law School.

To portray the different angles the council members hold, each shared their unique interest and reason for their work in AI.

“The interest here, ultimately, it comes down to my five children,” said Boyd, U.S. faith liaison for Future of Life Institute. “I want all of our children, and all the families that we care about, to have a future that’s ordered to the goods of our nature and not determined simply by a handful of people saying, ‘Well, here’s what we can build and be most efficient, most effective, most powerful.’”

Crawford said he is interested in the “anthropological concerns” and said he believes “we need to put on our political economy hats when thinking about AI.”

He added: “Because I think it’s going to be an intensification of certain trends that are already well established.”

Farahany said she wants to explore how AI tools can be used “in ways that promote my autonomy, don’t erode my overall confidence, enable me to continue to have purpose and meaning, and continue to be generative in the ways that are meaningful to me, and to think about what it means for human thought more generally.”

The group discussed some of the guiding framework document for the council that explains “it’s not the job of an AI ethics committee to give an understanding of human nature; it’s a task for traditions. But in our document we try to draw on different traditions,” Boyd said.

“So everything from Aristotle and Augustine … to finding what are the transcultural fundamental capabilities that we all agree on being essential to the human person, even if we would inflect them differently or break them down in different ways,” Boyd said.

It discusses the “idea of ‘what does it mean to have self-determination as a human being?’” Farahany said. “What does it need to have self-determination? To be the author of your own thoughts, to have the capacity to direct your own life. To know that when you say, I want to do something, that that want comes from you? That you are the author.”

Farahany further discussed that society can have more say and choice in the conversation on technology and AI if it is started on “a policy level.”

A council like this can help “to say here are the questions that we think you’re not asking. Here are some of the policy interventions that we’re not kind of appropriately exploring. And so rather than just looking at an endpoint saying it can be more capable to replace you human jobs, we can ask questions like, ‘Is it eroding human intellect at the same time that we’re growing the capacities of AI models?’” Farahany said.