AI Ethics in Higher Education: Insights from Africa and Beyond
Education
Regional
2023
1 Artificial Intelligence as a Socio-Technical System
Business leaders, policymakers and technologists regularly portray Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an easy way to make sense of an increasingly complex world. Unsurprisingly, AI plays a central role in strategy papers, TED talks and speeches about the future of mobility, revolutions in healthcare, or scientific innovation (Bhardwaj 2018; Cornet et al. 2017). In this often techno-optimistic narrative, AI is harmless. By remaining largely in the abstract, it is possible to keep the misconception alive that AI is merely a technical tool, albeit a powerful one, to address a myriad of challenges from digital transformation to global inequality to climate change. This changes drastically when AI moves from concept to application. The devel opment of AI applications is embedded in its social structure. That means that the norms, values, knowledge, and attitudes of developers influence how the AI application is designed and how it works. They become an inherent part of the application itself and can lead to undesirable consequences due to biased data or algorithmic designs. This raises serious concerns when AI is used for hiring employees, offering loans or even in criminal proceedings and makes decisions based on biased data about gender, ethnicity or age. For example, the facial recognition software of leading US-American companies has been shown to better work for faces with white and male characteristics (Lohr 2018). Arguably quite similar to the group of people that developed the respective algorithms (Guynn 2019). At the same time, AI is not used in a social vacuum. Instead, the applications serve a particular purpose in the real world. Keeping with the same example, if facial recognition is used in public CCTV or to identify suspects in criminal investigations it creates various problems (Chandran 2022).
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Research Type
Public policy and ethics
Organisation(s)
Technical University of Munich, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Tamale Technical University
Authors
Caitlin C. Corrigan, Jerry John Kponyo, Simon Atuah Asakipaam, Christoph Luetge