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AbstractEthical and social concerns are a key obstacle to the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the life sciences and beyond. The discussion of these issues has intensified in recent years and led to a number of approaches, tools and initiatives. Key amongst them is the idea of ex-ante impact assessments that aim to identify issues at the early stages of development. One prominent example of such ex-ante impact assessment is the European Union's (EU) Assessment list for Trustworthy AI (ALTAI). This article uses the findings of a large-scale application of the ALTAI to a large neuro-informatics project as an exemplar to demonstrate the effectiveness and limitations of the ALTAI in practice. The article shows that ex-ante impact assessment has the potential to help identify and address ethical and social issues. However, they need to be understood as part of a broader socio-technical ecosystem of AI. For ALTAI and related approaches to be useful in bio-medical research, they should be interpreted from a systems theory perspective which allows for their integration into the rich set of tools, legislation and approaches. The paper argues that ex-ante impact assessments have the best chance of being successful if seen applied in conjunction with other approaches in the context of the overall AI ecosystem.

AbstractArtificial intelligence (AI) can be seen to be at an inflexion point in India, a country which is keen to adopt and exploit new technologies, but needs to carefully consider how they do this. AI is usually deployed with good intentions, to unlock value and create opportunities for the people; however it does not come without its challenges. There are a set of ethical–social issues associated with AI, which include concerns around privacy, data protection, job displacement, historical bias and discrimination. Through a series of focus groups with knowledgeable people embedded in India and its culture, this research explores the ethical–societal changes and challenges that India now faces. Further, it investigates whether the principles and practices of responsible research and innovation (RRI) might provide a framework to help identify and deal with these issues. The results show that the areas in which RRI could offer scope to improve this outlook include education, policy and governance, legislation and regulation, and innovation and industry practices. Some significant challenges described by participants included: the lack of awareness of AI by the public as well as policy makers; India's access and implementation of Western datasets, resulting in a lack of diversity, exacerbation of existing power asymmetries, increase in social inequality and the creation of bias; the potential replacement of jobs by AI. One option was to look at a hybrid approach, a mix of AI and humans, with expansion and upskilling of the current workforce. In terms of strategy, there seems to be a gap between the rhetoric of the government and what is seen on the ground, and therefore going forward there needs to be a much greater engagement with a wider audience of stakeholders.

This paper argues that responsible innovation discourses must consider the changing nature of digital innovation, if they are to stand a chance of steering the development of technology towards democratically-acceptable ends. It explores the extent to which foundational narratives of Responsible (Research and) Innovation (RRI) consider problematic features of metatechnologies - defined here as "core information technologies upon which others are based, and whose use vastly expands the degrees of freedom with which humans can act in the social and material worlds" - and implications for responsible innovation discourse in the digital age. The study finds that references underpinning paradigmatic RRI accounts include digital and metatechnology examples, albeit briefly in some cases, somewhat reinforcing the validity of seminal RRI accounts in the context of new and emerging digital technologies with metatechnological attributes. The need for additional reflection on the problematic implications of digital technologies for RRI is identified, for example with respect to distributed development, and recombinant and network-level effects. The paper concludes that the continuing value of RRI as a discourse to society will depend on researchers' and practitioners' awareness of the potential of these technologies for cascading, downstream innovation.

ABSTRACT
This paper examines how the governance in AI policy documents have been framed as way to resolve public controversies surrounding AI. It draws on the studies of governance of emerging technologies, the concept of policy framing, and analysis of 49 recent policy documents dedicated to AI which have been prepared in the context of technological hype expecting fast advances of AI that will fundamentally change economy and society. The hype about AI is accompanied by major public controversy about positive and negative effects of AI. Against the backdrop of this policy controversy, governance emerges as one of the frames that diagnoses the problems and offers prescriptions. Accordingly, the current governance characterized by oligopoly of a small number of large companies is indicated as one of the reasons for problems such as lack of consideration of societal needs and concerns. To address these problems, governance frame in AI policy documents assigns more active and collaborative roles to the state and society. Amid public controversies, the state is assigned the roles of promoting and facilitating AI development while at the same time being a guarantor of risk mitigation and enabler of societal engagement. High expectations are assigned to public engagement with multiple publics as a way to increase diversity, representation and equality in AI development and use. While this governance frame might have a normative appeal, it is not specific about addressing some well-known challenges of the proposed governance mode such as risks of capture by vested interests or difficulties to achieve consensus.

The extensive disruption to and digital transformation of travel administration across borders largely due to COVID-19 mean that digital vaccine passports are being developed to resume international travel and kick-start the global economy. Currently, a wide range of actors are using a variety of different approaches and technologies to develop such a system. This paper considers the techno-ethical issues raised by the digital nature of vaccine passports and the application of leading-edge technologies such as blockchain in developing and deploying them. We briefly analyse four of the most advanced systems – IBM's Digital Health Passport "Common Pass," the International Air Transport Association's Travel Pass, the Linux Foundation Public Health's COVID-19 Credentials Initiative and the Vaccination Credential Initiative (Microsoft and Oracle) – and then consider the approach being taken for the EU Digital COVID Certificate. Each of these raises a range of issues, particularly relating to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the need for standards and due diligence in the application of innovative technologies (eg blockchain) that will directly challenge policymakers when attempting to regulate within the network of networks.

Drawing on more than eight years working to implement Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in the Human Brain Project, a large EU-funded research project that brings together neuroscience, computing, social sciences, and the humanities, and one of the largest investments in RRI in one project, this article offers insights on RRI and explores its possible future. We focus on the question of how RRI can have long-lasting impact and persist beyond the time horizon of funded projects. For this purpose, we suggest the concept of 'responsibility by design' which is intended to encapsulate the idea of embedding RRI in research and innovation in a way that makes it part of the fabric of the resulting outcomes, in our case, a distributed European Research Infrastructure. ; European Union's Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation 720270 785907 945539 650003 ; Versión publicada - versión final del editor