Digital Governance and Distributed Responsibility

Digital governance entails drafting and applying policies, protocols, and standards for the infosphere’s reasonable development, use, and management. A meshwork of interconnected societal challenges related to the burgeoning growth of information produced, stored, transferred, and exploited in digitized form remains loosely coupled to legal uncertainties regarding human rights. The question is whether international human rights law, as it has developed within the post-1945 conceptual framework, can address the challenges presented by the ascent of AI, and the transformations of agency.

As governments develop digital citizen-facing public services and e-identities, bureaucracies and private companies will need softlaws that address how government agencies or private companies may

This is especially important when data companies combine unrelated information stored in data lakes and data cooperatives to produce anonymized new data. The risk here is digital ethics cosmetics. In environmental ethics, greenwashing is the malpractice of a public or private actor seeking to appear ecologically friendlier and more sustainable than it is.

Ethics cosmetics is a form of misinformation and disinformation that aims to

The best strategy against this is transparency and education. Public, evidence-based transparency about best practices and ethical claims must have precedence to avoid the smokescreen of “ethics cosmetics.”

Private actors advocate self-regulation in the ethics of AI and lobby against the introduction of norms. This weakens the enforcement of legal standards and offers a justification for limited compliance with the law. This malpractice has sweeping effects at all levels of society and across every sector of the economy where ethics is exploited as an alternative to the rule of law.

One way or the other legislation catches up. However, the delay caused by short-term lobbying is unhelpful. It barricades the legislative agenda making compliance easier but misaligned with legal thinking and the anthropology of law. Regrettably, the collateral damage may unduly influence legislation.

If properly managed from the outset, self-regulation can be fatefully supplementary where

Ethicists are familiar with the malpractice of applying lenient or strict approaches in moral evaluations of the actions or the consequences of the actions of artificial or human agents. The risk of double standards may be inadvertently based on unfairness, prejudice, prejudgements, or even self-interest. In 2013, the European Commission coined the term “Ethics Dumping” to describe the export of unethical research practices to countries with weaker legal and ethical frameworks and enforcement mechanisms. This has been most prevalent in biological contexts. However, the term finds wide application today in data sciences, AI, and machine learning.

In biological and ecological circumstances, monitoring common principles outlined in international frameworks makes enforcement consistent and coherent with the support of institutions with global reach. However, in the age of AI-Assemblages the proliferation of principles and ethical frameworks can facilitate the export of illicit and dishonourable practices. Bad actors are more likely to engage in ethics dumping in contexts where disadvantaged populations, weaker institutions, legal uncertainties, unfair power distributions, and other social, political, and economic ills carry the day.

This is not to say that the global north is insulated from these malpractices. The gig economy can be seen as a case of ethics shirking within developed economies. The strategy against ethics shirking consists in tracking its origin. An absence of a clear allocation of responsibility happens in contexts where one’s responsibility may be mistakenly perceived as lower because it is distant, diminished, delegated, and distributed.

Addressing these problems requires more fairness, less bias, and a global ethic of distributed responsibility. This idea of distributed responsibility becomes more vivid when humans experience misadventures with imported self-driving vehicles, or with failing cells in the lithium batteries of electric cars.

Ethics shirking is the deresponsabilization of some agency. AI decouples agency from intelligence. This decoupling of decision-making power delegates authority to technological artefacts. The central view here is that AI is not a new form of intelligence, but an unmatched form of agency. Upholding the principle of autonomy in the context of AI requires a balance between the authority we delegate to artefacts, and the power we preserve as humans.

Decoupling intelligence from agency in the e-Age produces significant challenges regarding fairness, intelligibility (how does it work), beneficence (do only good), nonmaleficence, (do no harm), justice, trust, autonomy, accountability, transparency, and explicability. Therefore, digital governance in information societies is partly about managing our “res publica” and more about nurturing the relationships that make us social – our “ratio publica.”