Near-Term Artificial Intelligence and the Ethical Matrix

Abstract This chapter takes up the issue of near-term artificial intelligence, or the algorithms that are already in place in a variety of public and private sectors, guiding decisions from advertising and to credit ratings to sentencing in the justice system. There is a pressing need to recognize and evaluate the ways that structural racism, sexism, classism, and ableism may be embedded in and amplified by these systems. The chapter proposes a framework for ethical analysis that can be used to facilitate more robust ethical reflection in AI development and implementation. It presents an ethical matrix that incorporates the language of data science as a tool that data scientists can build themselves in order to integrate ethical analysis into the design process, addressing the need for immediate analysis and accountability over the design and deployment of near-term AI.