Research and Practice of AI Ethics: A Case Study Approach Juxtaposing Academic Discourse with Organisational Reality

This study investigates the ethical use of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies (BD + AI)—using an empirical approach. The paper categorises the current literature and presents a multi-case study of 'on-the-ground' ethical issues that uses qualitative tools to analyse findings from ten targeted case-studies from a range of domains. The analysis coalesces identified singular ethical issues, (from the literature), into clusters to offer a comparison with the proposed classification in the literature. The results show that despite the variety of different social domains, fields, and applications of AI, there is overlap and correlation between the organisations’ ethical concerns. This more detailed understanding of ethics in AI + BD is required to ensure that the multitude of suggested ways of addressing them can be targeted and succeed in mitigating the pertinent ethical issues that are often discussed in the literature.

[1]  Karin Oellers-Frahm,et al.  European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms , 2001 .

[2]  Lisa Portmess,et al.  Data barns, ambient intelligence and cloud computing: the tacit epistemology and linguistic representation of Big Data , 2014, Ethics and Information Technology.

[3]  Ruben Amarasingham,et al.  The legal and ethical concerns that arise from using complex predictive analytics in health care. , 2014, Health affairs.

[4]  Marijn Janssen,et al.  The challenges and limits of big data algorithms in technocratic governance , 2016, Gov. Inf. Q..

[5]  B. Stahl,et al.  Innovating responsibly in ICT for ageing:drivers, obstacles and implementation , 2017 .

[6]  Macnish Kevin,et al.  Case Study - Customer Relation Management, Smart Information Systems and Ethics , 2019, The ORBIT Journal.

[7]  A. Danna,et al.  All That Glitters is Not Gold: Digging Beneath the Surface of Data Mining , 2002 .

[8]  Antoniou Josephina,et al.  Case Study The Internet of Things and Ethics , 2019, The ORBIT Journal.

[9]  Ryan Mark,et al.  Ethics of Using Smart City AI and Big Data: The Case of Four Large European Cities , 2019, The ORBIT Journal.

[10]  Yuval Harari,et al.  Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow , 2015 .

[11]  Andrew D. Selbst,et al.  Big Data's Disparate Impact , 2016 .

[12]  Bernd Carsten Stahl,et al.  Responsible research and innovation in the digital age , 2017, Commun. ACM.

[13]  Frank Pasquale,et al.  The Spectrum of Control: A Social Theory of the Smart City , 2015, First Monday.

[14]  James M. DuBois,et al.  Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics , 2007 .

[15]  W. Firestone,et al.  Multisite Qualitative Policy Research: Optimizing Description and Generalizability , 1983 .

[16]  Jorge Horacio Doorn,et al.  Handbook of Research on Innovations in Database Technologies and Applications: Current and Future Trends , 2009 .

[17]  Jenna Burrell,et al.  How the machine ‘thinks’: Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms , 2016 .

[18]  Geoff Walsham,et al.  Doing interpretive research , 2006, Eur. J. Inf. Syst..

[19]  J. V. van Dijck,et al.  Understanding Social Media Logic , 2013 .

[20]  Tilimbe Jiya.  Ethical Implications of Predictive Risk Intelligence , 2019 .

[21]  Seth D. Baum.  Reconciliation between factions focused on near-term and long-term artificial intelligence , 2017, AI & SOCIETY.

[22]  Toon Calders,et al.  Building Classifiers with Independency Constraints , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops.

[23]  Jonathan Levin,et al.  Economics in the age of big data , 2014, Science.

[24]  Raymond C. Kurzweil,et al.  The Singularity Is Near , 2018, The Infinite Desire for Growth.

[25]  Robert K. Yin,et al.  Qualitative Research from Start to Finish , 2010 .

[26]  Nuria Oliver,et al.  The Tyranny of Data? The Bright and Dark Sides of Data-Driven Decision-Making for Social Good , 2016, ArXiv.

[27]  A. Zwitter.  Big Data ethics , 2014, Big Data Soc..

[28]  Web, Artificial Intelligence and Network Applications - Proceedings of the Workshops of the 33rd International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, AINA Workshops 2019, Matsue, Japan, March 27-29, 2019 , 2019, AINA Workshops.

[29]  Geoff Walsham,et al.  Interpretive case studies in IS research: nature and method , 1995 .

[30]  Big Data Analytics and Human Rights , 2018 .

[31]  Lee McIntyre,et al.  The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science , 2016 .

[32]  J. Johnson.  Open Data, Big Data, and Just Data , 2018 .

[33]  Bernard Reber,et al.  Responsible Innovation in the Light of Moral Responsibility , 2015 .

[34]  Rifat Atun,et al.  Artificial intelligence and algorithmic bias: implications for health systems , 2019, Journal of global health.

[35]  Y. N. Harari,et al.  Homo Deus: Eine Geschichte von Morgen , 2017 .

[36]  Anna Fensel,et al.  Big data impact on society: a research roadmap for Europe , 2016, Technology in Society.

[37]  Macnish Kevin,et al.  Smart Information Systems in Cybersecurity , 2019, The ORBIT Journal.

[38]  Jiya Tilimbe,et al.  Ethical Reflections of Human Brain Research and Smart Information Systems , 2019, The ORBIT Journal.

[39]  Jen Schradie.  Big data is too small: research implications of class inequality for online data collection , 2017 .

[40]  Kevin Macnish.  Government Surveillance and Why Defining Privacy Matters in a Post‐Snowden World , 2016 .

[41]  Ryan Mark,et al.  Ethics of Using AI and Big Data in Agriculture: The Case of a Large Agriculture Multinational , 2019, The ORBIT Journal.

[42]  Jeffrey Alan Johnson,et al.  From open data to information justice , 2014, Ethics and Information Technology.

[43]  Ryan Mark,et al.  Ethics of Public Use of AI and Big Data , 2019, The ORBIT Journal.

[44]  Andreas M. Kaplan,et al.  A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: On the Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Intelligence , 2019, California Management Review.

[45]  Omer Tene,et al.  Big Data for All: Privacy and User Control in the Age of Analytics , 2012 .

[46]  Michael A. Osborne,et al.  The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? , 2017 .

[47]  Kate M. Miltner,et al.  Big Data| Critiquing Big Data: Politics, Ethics, Epistemology | Special Section Introduction , 2014 .

[48]  Anna Jobin,et al.  The global landscape of AI ethics guidelines , 2019, Nature Machine Intelligence.

[49]  Nilay Khare,et al.  Big data privacy: a technological perspective and review , 2016, Journal of Big Data.

[50]  Kamlesh Patil,et al.  Big data privacy: a technological perspective and review , 2017 .

[51]  L. Taylor.  What is data justice? The case for connecting digital rights and freedoms globally , 2017, Big Data Soc..

[52]  Nick Couldry,et al.  Big Data from the bottom up , 2014, Big Data Soc..

[53]  Bernd Carsten Stahl,et al.  Responsible Data Governance of Neuroscience Big Data , 2019, Front. Neuroinform..

[54]  Mariarosaria Taddeo,et al.  The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate , 2016, Big Data Soc..

[55]  Gregory Wheeler,et al.  Machine Epistemology and Big Data , 2016 .

[56]  Tony Doyle,et al.  Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy , 2017, Inf. Soc..

[57]  Shoshana Zuboff,et al.  Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization , 2015, J. Inf. Technol..

[58]  Jules Polonetsky,et al.  A Theory of Creepy: Technology, Privacy and Shifting Social Norms , 2013 .

[59]  Jens-Erik Mai,et al.  Big data privacy: The datafication of personal information , 2016, Inf. Soc..

[60]  Nathan Newman,et al.  The Costs of Lost Privacy: Consumer Harm and Rising Economic Inequality in the Age of Google , 2013 .

[61]  John P A Ioannidis,et al.  Informed Consent, Big Data, and the Oxymoron of Research That Is Not Research , 2013, The American journal of bioethics : AJOB.

[62]  Yili Hong,et al.  Reliability Meets Big Data: Opportunities and Challenges , 2014 .

[63]  Francis Kuriakose,et al.  Human Rights in the Big Data World , 2018 .

[64]  D. Boyd,et al.  CRITICAL QUESTIONS FOR BIG DATA , 2012 .

[65]  A. Souissi,et al.  Occupational health and safety in the industry 4.0 era: A cause for major concern? , 2018, Safety Science.

[66]  Tony Bush,et al.  Authenticity in Research: Reliability, Validity and Triangulation , 2012 .

[67]  Nick Wallace,et al.  The Impact of the EU’s New Data Protection Regulation on AI , 2018 .