Chris Schmitz and Joanna Bryson, Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 8(3), 2292-2293, 2025. In preparation for a journal submission.
In Spring 2025 I realised that the ongoing myth of AI as necessarily opaque was actually related to the problem of transparency in government in interesting ways. Both governments and AI systems are subject to intentional design, so transparency can be a design criteria. Further, AI can be a method for achieving transparency in both, and democratic governance can ground that transparency in the requirements for legitimacy. Meanwhile, Chris Schmitz, a PhD student in public administration, recognised interesting correspondences between my theories of moral agency and a leading (Weberian) theory of bureaucracy. In this paper, we present a three-point Moral Agency Framework for legitimate integration of AI in bureaucratic structures: (a) maintain clear and just human lines of accountability, (b) ensure humans whose work is augmented by AI systems can verify the systems are functioning correctly, and (c) introduce AI only where it doesn’t inhibit the capacity of bureaucracies towards either of their twin aims of legitimacy and stewardship. We suggest that AI introduced within this framework can not only improve efficiency and productivity while avoiding ethics sinks, but also improve the transparency and even the legitimacy of a bureaucracy.
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