Local public services and the ethical deployment of artificial intelligence

Abstract

Responding to growing criticism that the use of artificial intelligence in public services reinforces unethical activities such as discrimination, the paper presents two new cases from the cities in Finland, both self-describing as centres for the ethical use of AI. Structured by an ethical AI foresighting framework we explore how and why AI is being used in local public services and its outcomes, the degree to which current AI-enabled public services are ethically evaluated and whether ethical evaluation features in trends for future AI use.

The research objectives are to demonstrate how AI is being deployed in cities claiming to be European centres for ethical AI use, to innovate new service models and to present a new framework, based on social learning to help analysis of ethics in AI-related innovation processes, in particular those enhancing accountability to citizens. In doing so, we show in practical terms how ethical decision-making processes are identified and responded to addressing explainability and understandability issues.

We suggest that negative ethical results from AI use can be avoided, however this requires an ethos of citizen involvement in innovation processes and significant investment in times and attention to distribute learning and opinions between providers, technical partners and service users include an acknowledgment that technical partners learn from users as well as users learning from technical partners.