Digital Ethics: Toward a Socially Preferable Development of AI Systems

The 4th Revolution has required reflecting on the social, economic, and environmental effects of digital technologies. Especially in the last decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the central topics of this reflection, identifying the impacts that these powerful technologies have now and in the future at each level of human life. Thus, this chapter analyzes the recent and broad term “digital ethics” as a possible conceptual framework to address ethical dilemmas and gather the potential of these technologies. Subsequently, (1) the central role of data and algorithms in contemporary digital and information societies will be discussed; (2) the concept of digital ethics, its nature, and its scope will be defined; (3) the ethics of AI will be examined, framing the philosophical principles that support it; (4) the figure ethics as a service will be analyzed as an analytical device from the organizational setting that enables the practical implementation of ethical principles in the design and development of AI systems; and finally (5) ethics-based auditing will be introduced as an AI governance mechanism that seeks to constantly review and verify the appropriate materialization of ethical principles in algorithms and services based on AI. All of the above develop technologies that bring positive effects and reduce negative consequences to society.