Ethics is the lady of judgment

Almost a year has passed since we launched the "AI Principles and Guidelines" in January 2019, by which we wanted to regulate the relationship between the human consumer of AI technologies and applications and these technologies on the one hand, and to regulate and control the process of their programming and manufacture and the individuals and institutions responsible for designing and producing AI applications.

Of course, the moment we launched it, the concerns associated with artificial intelligence were still hypothetical for many and perhaps even now, but today it has become a more urgent necessity, but why? What is its direct relationship to the data?

If we want to see the change in the world’s stance on the subject of what the media and social media will be, the first area that floats about this change, which applies to artificial intelligence, including a recent news that was titled “German artist deceives Google maps” and the summary of the news is that a German artist named Simon He used to use 99 mobile phones connected to the Google Maps application, to delude the Google platform that one of the Berlin areas was full of slow traffic, even though the streets were empty, and he appeared in a photo published by the media pulling a small cart carrying phones, and the street is completely empty.

What the artist did was intentionally manipulating, in order to prove his view that Google was hostage to the phone data and how it used it. Of course, this is an intervention that can be described as benign in the type of data that the technology is fed with and the resulting decisions, but what happened in this simple experiment can be harmful in the absence of principles and ethics that control the employment of technologies more and more in life experiences.

The data in our lives continues to flow, some of which are voluntarily transmitted by the devices that we use daily such as smartphones, and other data that is systematically classified and fed by the platforms based on the intervention and decisions of the trustworthy person on that, so today we most need to enhance the application of technology and data governance more than any time ago.

In Dubai, technology and data governance has been and remains a strategic pillar of Dubai's smart business mechanism, and the ethical controls for using data in government work are regulated by the Dubai Data Law and data policies. On the private sector level, we developed a strategy and launched principles, guidelines and ethics, and although they are not yet binding globally, the numbers and the level of interaction with them on our websites tell us that interest in them is increasing. The media and the news that it communicates about technologies and their misuse make technical ethics the rule of law, as it is in human dealings.

Assistant General Manager of "Smart Dubai", Executive Director of Dubai Data Corporation

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