AI reflections in 2020

Our article offered the first systematically conducted review of published artificial intelligence (AI) ethics guidelines. We analysed 84 documents and found that, despite an apparent convergence on certain ethical principles on the surface level, there are substantive divergences on how these principles are interpreted, why they are deemed important, what issue, domain or actors they pertain to, and how they should be implemented. Scholarly and public discussions on AI ethics have certainly evolved. Although the illusion that'ethical AI' is simply a technological matter still lingers, 2020 has seen an important push towards broader acceptance of the sociotechnicity of AI. Acknowledging the sociotechnical nature of AI systems requires us, as Pratyusha Kalluri put it succinctly1, to centre less on fairness, or on'AI for good', and more on power distribution and power differentials.