Towards an Inclusive Future in AI — A Global Participatory Process
In response to the accelerating potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform our lives, various governments, multilateral bodies, and other organizations have produced high-level principles and guidelines for the ethical use of AI in recent years. Despite the staggering number of such documents (over 90 by October 2019), there appears to be a relatively high degree of convergence on the level of principles. «Inclusiveness» is one of just a handful of principles that most actors seem to agree upon. However, a closer look reveals that the principle is interpreted very differently in terms of the domain, scope and actors it pertains to. As the global community now works on transitioning from principle to practice, there is a clear need to specify what the principles mean in context and how they can be operationalized and evaluated. To respond to this gap, the swissnex Network, foraus, and AI Commons launched the global campaign «Towards an Inclusive Future in AI» with foraus' new Policy Kitchen methodology. This joint experiment resulted in 11 workshops in 8 countries, involving 10 partner organizations and about 120 participants from a wide range of perspectives, who collaboratively generated 43 ideas for an inclusive future in AI. The preliminary output was presented at the AI for Good Global Summit 2019. This paper presents a more in-depth exploration of ideas and proposals on inclusion collected during the participatory process.