AI Ethics: Software Practitioners and Lawmakers Points of View

Despite their commonly accepted usefulness, AI technologies are concerned with ethical unreliability. Various guidelines, principles, and regulatory frameworks are designed to ensure that AI technologies bring ethical well-being. However, the implications of AI ethics principles and guidelines are still being debated. To further explore the significance of AI ethics principles and relevant challenges, we conducted an empirical survey of 99 AI practitioners and lawmakers from twenty countries across five continents. Study findings confirm that transparency, accountability, and privacy are the most critical AI ethics principles. On the other hand, lack of ethical knowledge, no legal frameworks, and lacking monitoring bodies are found the most common AI ethics challenges. The impact analysis of the challenges across AI ethics principles reveals that conflict in practice is a highly severe challenge. Our findings stimulate further research, epically empowering existing capability maturity models to support the quality assessment of ethics-aware AI systems.