Human-centred artificial intelligence: a contextual morality perspective

ABSTRACT

The emergence of big data combined with the technical developments in Artificial Intelligence has enabled novel opportunities for autonomous and continuous decision support. While initial work has begun to explore how human morality can inform the decision making of future Artificial Intelligence applications, these approaches typically consider human morals as static and immutable. In this work, we present an initial exploration of the effect of context on human morality from a Utilitarian perspective. Through an online narrative transportation study, in which participants are primed with either a positive story, a negative story or a control condition (N = 82), we collect participants' perceptions on technology that has to deal with moral judgment in changing contexts. Based on an in-depth qualitative analysis of participant responses, we contrast participant perceptions to related work on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. Our work highlights the importance of contextual morality for Artificial Intelligence and identifies opportunities for future work through a FACT-based (Fairness, Accountability, Context and Transparency) perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• contextual morality
• algorithmic bias
• artificial intelligence
• ethics
• decision support

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Yelp website at https://www.yelp.com/

2 Airbnb website at https://www.airbnb.com

3 Text and images are in the public domain and can be found on the Project Gutenberg website at https://www.gutenberg.org

4 Prolific website at https://prolific.ac/

5 The trolley problem is an ethical thought experiment. In its traditional form, a participant is asked to choose to either intervene in the trajectory of an oncoming trolley and save the life of five persons at the cost of killing one person – or to refrain from action and let the trolley kill five innocent persons.

6 Google AI blog feature announcement at https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/05/efficient-smart-reply-now-for-gmail.html