The surprising capabilities demonstrated by AI technologies overlaid on detailed data and fine-grained control give cause for concern that agents can wield enormous power over human welfare, drawing increasing attention to ethics in AI. This tutorial introduces ethics as a sociotechnical construct, demonstrating how ethics can be modeled and analyzed, and requirements on ethics (value preferences) can be elicited, in a self-* sociotechnical system (STS).

Ethics is inherently a multiagent concern—an amalgam of (1) one party’s concern for another and (2) a notion of justice. To capture the multiagent conception, this tutorial introduces ethics as a sociotechnical construct. Specifically, we demonstrate how ethics can be modeled and analyzed, and requirements on ethics (value preferences) can be elicited, in an STS. An STS comprises of autonomous social entities (principals, i.e., people and organizations), and technical entities (agents, who help principals), and resources (e.g., data, services, sensors, and actuators).

This tutorial includes three key elements.
(1) Specifying a decentralized STS, representing ethical postures of individual agents as well as the systemic (STS level) ethical posture.
(2) Reasoning about ethics, including how individual agents can select actions that align with the ethical postures of all concerned principals. (3) Eliciting value preferences (which capture ethical requirements) of stakeholders using a value-based negotiation technique.

We build upon our earlier tutorials (e.g., at AAMAS 2020) on engineering ethics in sociotechnical systems. However, we extend the previous tutorials substantially, including ideas on ethics and values. Attendees will learn the theoretical foundations as well as how to apply those foundations to systematically engineer an ethical STS.

Website: [https://sites.google.com/view/ai-ethics/tutorials/acsos-2020}

Organizers:
* Nirav Ajmeri, North Carolina State University
* Pradeep K. Murukannaiah, Delft University of Technology
* Munindar P. Singh, North Carolina State University

Target audience:
This tutorial is presented at a senior undergraduate student level. It is accessible to developers from industry and to students. Typical attendees for our past tutorials have been researchers and practitioners from industry and government, developers, graduate and senior undergraduate students, and university faculty.

Prerequisites:
None