Concerns around the negative impact of AI on equality and diversity, privacy, social justice, and democracy highlight that citizens, businesses, and governments around the world are struggling to understand how they can access the opportunities AI offers while avoiding its potential harms.

This has led to a flurry of initiatives driven by civil society, industry, governmental, and transnational organisations to create ethical frameworks for AI, design new regulation, and establish bodies that will provide oversight and policy advice. All of these recognise that it is important to translate high-level ethical principles to practice, but this is not proving to be straightforward at all.

At the University of Edinburgh, we pursue an ambitious programme of interdisciplinary research to address this AI ethics challenge, advocating an approach that focuses on tackling ethical issues surrounding AI in context, in close engagement with the stakeholders involved in and affected by new AI innovations, and with an emphasis on the inextricable connection between technology and its users.

We engage in a combination of technical, humanities, and social research, focusing on a set of core themes:

1. Developing moral foundations for AI
2. Anticipating and evaluating the risks and benefits of AI
3. Creating responsible innovation pathways for the adoption of AI
4. Developing AI technologies that satisfy ethical requirements
5. Transforming the practice of AI research and innovation

We believe that that bringing these lines of investigation together has the potential to make a step change in the readiness of society to tackle the AI ethics challenge. You can find out more about research centres and groups that focus on this challenge in the Useful Links.