Specialists from the Artificial Intelligence Center of Novosibirsk State University have developed a draft national standard that includes a humanitarian review with assessments of the risks and opportunities that people receive with the mass implementation of developments in the field of artificial intelligence.
Humanitarian review is a multidisciplinary study that uses methods from various sciences to analyze and evaluate information, problems, and phenomena related to humans and society, and in this case, the interaction between humans and artificial intelligence.
The draft national standard "Humanitarian Review of the Implementation of AI Systems in Smart City Development Practices," if approved, could become the first regulatory document in international practice to consider the humanitarian component of AI projects.
Currently, artificial intelligence projects are presented as engineering or technical systems with different functionalities. But the question of what will happen to a person, their abilities, health, moral principles, orientations, and meanings if this project is massively implemented into the structures of our daily life, such as education, science, management, and healthcare, is not addressed.
When creating the new national standard, specialists relied on existing standards, including those related to artificial intelligence. They also took into account many years of experience in applying ethical review in biotechnology, medicine, healthcare, and genetics. This experience became especially important when questions arose related to human cloning and genome editing.
As a tool for assessing the humanitarian opportunities and risks of implementing an artificial intelligence system, a questionnaire is proposed, including moral and ethical questions: "Does the project help solve a social, humanitarian problem?", "In what direction does the comfort of the environment, safety, and health of people change with the implementation of the system?", and others.
The questionnaire involves taking into account the opinions of different target categories of citizens — residents, professional groups (service users), representatives of city authorities, investors, experts, and the developers themselves. Each item is rated on a ten-point scale, and the answers are summed up, yielding an aggregated indicator separately for humanitarian risks and humanitarian potential.
The result when deriving the aggregated indicator within the framework of the humanitarian review is also influenced by the smart city index, introduced by the Ministry of Construction of the Russian Federation, and the urban environment quality index, approved by the government.
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