Professional Ethics by Design: Co-creating Codes of Conduct for Computational Practice

TL;DR

This paper advocates for a design-inspired approach to develop computational codes of conduct, enabling various professions to address ethical issues in AI and computational practices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for co-creating ethical codes of conduct tailored for computational practitioners across diverse fields.

Findings

Proposes a design-based methodology for encoding ethics into computational systems.

Highlights the need for adaptable ethical guidelines in AI regulation.

Connects legal developments with technical approaches to ethics.

Abstract

This paper deals with the importance of developing codes of conduct for practitioners--be it journalists, doctors, attorneys, or other professions--that are encountering ethical issues when using computation, but do not have access to any framework of reference as to how to address those. At the same time, legal and technological developments are calling for establishing such guidelines, as shown in the European Union's and the United States' efforts in regulating a wide array of artificial intelligence systems, and in the resurgence of rule-based models through 'neurosymbolic' AI, a hybrid format that combines them with neural methods. Against this backdrop, we argue for taking a design-inspired approach when encoding professional ethics into a computational form, so as to co-create codes of conduct for computational practice across a wide range of fields.