Stay Human. The quest for Responsibility in the Algorithmic Society

Abstract: recent developments of Artificial Intelligence based on machine learning techniques through Big Data raise multiple ethical and legal concerns, all of which ultimately do turn around the issues of responsibility, which is increasingly invoked not as a remedy but as a character which shall shape the whole development process of AI as well as its functioning. The characters of AI, taken in its technical and social role, challenge some established ideas related to human agency, namely responsibility. Recently two scholars like Jack Balkin (director of the Yale Information Society Project he founded on 1997) and Frank Pasquale (author of The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information, 2015) proposed “new laws of robotics for the Algorithmic Society” inspired to Isaac Asimov’s ones, but targeting the human agents behind the development and the use of AI. On the other side, Responsible Research and Innovation model has been proposed as a model for the responsible development of AI. Whilst the reference to responsibility is appealing, nevertheless the inflation of its disparate usages may obscure the meaning associated with it. This article wants to contribute to the understanding of the issues behind the idea of preserving the human character of responsibility when confronted to the risks of its dissolution induced by the increasingly relevant roles played by AI in our societies.