Final days to respond to Consultation on Draft AI Ethics Guidelines

At the start of 2019, we brought you news of the European Commission’s coordinated plan on artificial intelligence (AI), as well as new guidelines on how to deal with the ethical issues relating to AI from the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (link to original article here).

The first draft of those guidelines has been open for consultation since 18 December, and the closing date for responses has been extended to Friday 1^st February 2019.

The AI community will be closely monitoring the outcome of the consultation. One such interested group is the H2020 SmartWork project, which launched earlier this month in Athens. It seeks to use AI to help improve health outcomes and quality of work of ageing workers, through a Worker-Centric AI System for work ability sustainability. In other words, keeping ageing people working for longer by supporting them with unobtrusive sensing and monitoring of their health, behaviour, cognitive and emotional status, and responding to their needs. The use of AI in the workplace raises important ethical issues for consideration, and the Ethics Guidelines will help to inform the wider development of the SmartWork system.

The guidelines provide an overview of the fundamental rights and high-level principles and values with which AI should comply, set out concrete requirements (such as ensuring privacy, accountability and transparency) for AI systems, and offer a practical list for AI developers and deployers to follow to make sure that AI systems are trustworthy once operational. 

You can provide your feedback through the following Consultation Form.

Following the consultation, the AI HLEG will finalise the Guidelines, which it aims to present to the Commission in March 2019. More information is available here.