A Capability Approach to Ethics-Based Auditing in Medical AI

In the past few years, the rapid dissemination of AI tools has radically changed the way public and private institutions relate to users and citizens. The relative autonomy and scalability of AI tools pose serious legal and ethical challenges. Over and above legal challenges, there are energetic debates on how the ethical impacts can be identified, and the right governance mechanisms that can address them. As a solution to these problems, it has been proposed that AI ethicists should take inspiration from auditing processes. This approach has been called ethics-based auditing (EBA), and both procedurally and content-wise is based on an underlying conception of ethics that significantly draw from the recent principled turn in AI ethics, which is notoriously fraught with difficulties. In this talk, Dr. Ratti will introduce an alternative framework for EBAs that is not based on the principled approach. In particular, he aims at conceptualizing EBA - and AI ethics altogether - on the basis of the capability approach. Rather than checking for compliance to vague principles, EBAs should investigate the impact of AI tools to human capabilities. Dr. Ratti will formulate a preliminary characterization of capability-based EBA in the context of medical AI.