AI Sustainability in Practice Part Two: Sustainability Throughout the AI Workflow
From The Embassy of Good Science
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AI Sustainability in Practice Part Two: Sustainability Throughout the AI Workflow
What is this about?
In 2021, the UK's National AI Strategy recommended that UK Government’s official Public Sector Guidance on AI Ethics and Safety be transformed into a series of practice-based workbooks. The result is the AI Ethics and Governance in Practice Programme. This series of eight workbooks provides end-to-end guidance on how to apply principles of AI ethics and safety to the design, development, deployment, and maintenance of AI systems. It provides public sector organisations with a Process Based Governance (PBG) Framework designed to assist AI project teams in ensuring that the AI technologies they build, procure, or use are ethical, safe, and responsible.
This workbook is part two of two workbooks on AI Sustainability in Practice.Why is this important?
The sustainability of AI systems depends on the capacity of project teams to proceed with a continuous sensitivity to their potential real-world impacts and transformative effects. Stakeholder Impact Assessments (SIAs) are governance mechanisms that enable this kind of responsiveness. They are tools that create a procedure for, and a means of documenting, the collaborative evaluation and reflective anticipation of the possible harms and benefits of AI innovation projects. SIAs are not one-off governance actions. They require project teams to pay continuous attention to the dynamic and changing character of AI production and use and to the shifting conditions of the real-world environments in which AI technologies are embedded.
For whom is this important?
What are the best practices?
This workbook provides a template of the SIA and activities that allow a deeper dive into crucial parts of it. For example, it discusses methods for weighing values and considering trade-offs during the SIA process, and highlights the need to approach the SIA as an end-to-end process of responsive evaluation and re-assessment. The workbook also includes a series of activities related to AI in Urban Planning to assist public sector bodies in developing a shared vocabulary and practical skills to implement ethical AI projects.
