Consent as a Foundation for Responsible Autonomy

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the role of consent in enabling responsible autonomy in AI agents, emphasizing its importance for ethical decision-making and outlining challenges for implementing consent in multiagent systems.

Contribution

It offers a conceptual analysis of consent's benefits and challenges, and proposes directions for modeling consent to foster responsible autonomous AI.

Findings

Provides a detailed conceptual analysis of consent in AI.

Identifies key challenges for implementing consent in multiagent systems.

Outlines future research directions for responsible autonomy.

Abstract

This paper focuses on a dynamic aspect of responsible autonomy, namely, to make intelligent agents be responsible at run time. That is, it considers settings where decision making by agents impinges upon the outcomes perceived by other agents. For an agent to act responsibly, it must accommodate the desires and other attitudes of its users and, through other agents, of their users. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it provides a conceptual analysis of consent, its benefits and misuses, and how understanding consent can help achieve responsible autonomy. Second, it outlines challenges for AI (in particular, for agents and multiagent systems) that merit investigation to form as a basis for modeling consent in multiagent systems and applying consent to achieve responsible autonomy.