What — AI ethics tries to achieve
In the age of commodified, powerful AI you can increasingly get what you want if you know how to ask.
But what should we want? And how can we articulate that?
The AGF equips people with a system of carefully researched, deeply integrated concepts and relationships among them. It is designed to help people ask the kinds of questions that lead to impactful ethical alignment — among humans, within groups, and with AI systems.
Ethical alignment has enormous practical implications.
Ethical conflict can destroy organizations, societies, and individuals. These conflicts can easily be amplified by AI systems, even if those systems are well-aligned with different groups of people who are in conflict.
Ethical alignment also makes extensive coordination possible, and its impacts show up in organizations’ capacities to train, recruit, retain, and motivate their teams.
Its significance doesn’t stop there, though. Alignment also matters within individuals, too: living with integrity, living lives where our choices align with our own deepest commitments, is essential to the good life.
If ethics isn’t worth pursuing for its own sake, what is?
Ethically aligned AI integration requires people who can articulate what ethical alignment means for themselves, and for AI so they can recognize when it is present or absent.
The AGF is a controlled vocabulary and set of supporting visual models designed to help people do that.
It is designed to be integrated into the AI ethics frameworks of different groups as part of their comprehensive ethical governance and management strategies.
It doesn’t define how your organization approaches important questions like justice, assessing whether your overall impact is positive, or the specific privacy, disclosure and IP requirements in your context.
But it supports your articulation of those other crucial elements. It also provides practical ethical guidance that can be integrated throughout your governance and management processes.
You may have heard that people sometimes commit to things, but don’t follow through.
In AI ethics, the problem is widely noted. We refer to it as “The Integration Gap.”
The AGF is designed to help you close this gap by integrating AI ethics, governance and management into your existing policies, procedures, and practices.
The Aligned Groups Framework prescribes a systematic integration of AI using an integration framework called Ethical Governance and Management (EGM).
It is designed to make ethical AI integration engaging, fruitful, and normal instead of just being something you feel guilty for not doing.
EGM is not a complete system on its own. It is a systematic approach to coordinating your systems in the context of AI integration so that you can close the integration gap.