Escaping the Western Cosm-Ethical Hegemony: The Importance of Cultural Diversity in the Ethical Assessment of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The world of Artificial intelligence (AI) is struggling to set standards that would be globally applied. In this struggle, ethics is extensively summoned to regulate the development and use of AI systems, but also to promote vested interests.

The potential benefits associated with AI are such that many actors, public and private, have entered a race for AI dominance. Running at the international level, racers are way less preoccupied by ethical considerations than by the strategic outcomes of AI.

Led by the United States and China, the race does not give much room for outsiders such as the European Union. Yet, through norms, some actors are slowly taking over AI regulation, and consequently shaping the whole market setting the limits regarding what is ethically acceptable and what is not.

Thus, norms have become a tool for dominance, and short of legal ones, ethics is slowly imposing itself as the only regulatory option. Aware of the power of norms, the West has slowly spread its normative influence all around the world, releasing hundreds of documents pertaining to ethical principles. Doing so, the Western world is denying the reality of the humankind and its diversity of ethical stances.

Trying to impose through ethical narratives its own views on ethics applied to AI, it is shaping perceptions and influencing behaviors without consideration for the wide range of ethical traditions. Thus, as cosmetics helps to adorn faces, cosm-ethics has taken over ethics to makes the crude reality more beautiful. Using words of ethics, cosm-ethics is widely used by communication specialists to artificially build trust and promote specific interests. It legitimates and justifies the development and use of AI systems.

This paper aims at opening a debate on the reality of ethics applied to AI. It contextualizes the subject in a wider setting of race for AI dominance (1), stressing the Western ethical hegemony over AI (2) established through a pseudo ethical narrative (3). To illustrate these points, it focuses on the case of the European Union (4), to eventually stress the urgent need for cultural pluralism in the field of ethics applied to AI (5).