Communications of the ACM

Empowering the user requires a complete rethinking of the role of the user in the digital society. The user is no longer a passive consumer of digital technologies and a data producer for them. Her dignity as a human being implies ownership of personal data and freedom of making responsible decisions. Autonomous technologies shall be designed and developed to respect it. This lifts the user to become an independent actor in the digital society able to properly interact with the autonomous technologies she uses every day and equipped with the appropriate digital means.

The separation of digital ethics in hard and soft ethics suggests that hard ethics is what the autonomous system shall comply with while soft ethics is specific to each individual/ user. To obey the principle of human dignity the system during its interactions with each individual shall not violate her soft ethics. The autonomous system architecture shall permit this interaction to happen by complying with the user’s moral prerogatives and capabilities. Users need to be able to verify the system they use by possibly imposing on them their own ethical requirements. The separation of concerns implied by the above notion of digital ethics suggests an overall framework in which the autonomy of the system is delimited by hard ethics requirements, users are empowered with their own soft ethics, and the interactions between the system and each user are further constrained by their soft ethics requirements. Therefore, the capability of an autonomous system to make decisions does not only need to comply with legislation but also with a user’s moral preferences. (See the intersection between soft and hard ethics in the accompanying figure.)

In such a framework, it should also be possible to deal with liability issues in a fine-grained way by distributing responsibility between the system and the user(s) according to hard and soft ethics. The envisioned framework requires several steps.

On the ethics side, provided that au-
tonomous systems will be developed
by complying with hard ethics that is
with the regulations, the crucial issue
to face is to respect each individual’s
soft ethics. If verifying the compli-
ance of autonomous systems to hard
ethics is already raising huge scien-
tific interest and great worries (given
the use of obscure AI techniques), 1, 2, 14
defining the scope of soft ethics and
characterizing individual ones is a
daunting task. Indeed, neither a per-
son nor a society applies moral cat-
egories separately. Rather, everyday
morality is in constant flux among
norms, utilitarian assessment of con-
sequences, and evaluation of virtues.
Nevertheless, a digital society that
fully realizes the principle of human
dignity shall allow each individual to
express her soft ethics preferences.
Further challenges concern means to
consistently combine user soft ethics
with system hard ethics and to man-
age interactions of the system with
users endorsing different ethics pref-
erences. Autonomous systems shall
be realized by embedding hard eth-
ics by design but remaining open to
accommodate users’ soft ethics. This
could be achieved through system
customization or by mediating inter-
actions between the system and the
user, in any case through rethinking
the system architecture.
Building systems that embody
ethical principles by design may also
permit acquiring a competitive ad-
vantage in the market, as predicted
in the recent Gartner Top 10 Strategic
Technology Trends for 2019.23

Computer scientists alone cannot solve the scientific and technical challenges we have ahead. A multi-disciplinary effort is needed that calls for philosophers, sociologists, law specialists, and computer scientists working together.

Acknowledgments. The author is indebted to the multi-disciplinary team of the EXOSOUL@univaq project ( http://exosoul.disim.univaq.it) for enlightening debates and joint work on digital ethics for autonomous systems.

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Paola Inverardi is a professor in the Department of Information Engineering Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy.