Ethically Aligned Design: An empirical evaluation of the RESOLVEDD-strategy in Software and Systems development context

TL;DR

This paper empirically evaluates the RESOLVEDD-strategy, a tool from business ethics, for promoting ethical considerations in AI system development through a case study involving student projects.

Contribution

It provides evidence on the effectiveness of the RESOLVEDD-strategy in encouraging ethical responsibility in software development contexts.

Findings

Presence of ethical tools increases ethical responsibility.

Ethical considerations are influenced even without intrinsic motivation.

The RESOLVEDD-strategy can be applied in software development processes.

Abstract

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) in human contexts calls for ethical considerations for the design and development of AI-based systems. However, little knowledge currently exists on how to provide useful and tangible tools that could help software developers and designers implement ethical considerations into practice. In this paper, we empirically evaluate a method that enables ethically aligned design in a decision-making process. Though this method, titled the RESOLVEDD-strategy, originates from the field of business ethics, it is being applied in other fields as well. We tested the RESOLVEDD-strategy in a multiple case study of five student projects where the use of ethical tools was given as one of the design requirements. A key finding from the study indicates that simply the presence of an ethical tool has an effect on ethical consideration, creating more responsibility even in instances where the use of the tool is not intrinsically motivated.