Non-maleficence

• The principle of beneficence says “do good”, while the principle of non-maleficence states “do no harm”.

• AI ethics aims to mitigate ethical risks, such as discrimination and privacy, and physical and social harm, in AI applications, with a primary focus on non-maleficence.

• Moral problems are seen as things that can be solved by technical “fixes”, or by good design alone.

• Technical systems often ignore issues covering wider ethical and societal context that direct the control, governance and societal dimensions.

• Consider whether the city’s health care organisation should move from “reactive” to “preventive” healthcare.

  • Benefits
    • Sickness prevention has a lot of potential to improve the health and quality of life for citizens
    • Allows better impact estimation and planning of basic healthcare services
    • Potential to significantly reduce social and healthcare costs
  • Problems
    • The systems raise a number of legal and ethical issues regarding privacy, security, and the use of data
      • Where is the border between acceptable prevention and non-acceptable intrusion?
      • Does the city have a right to use private, sensitive medical data for identifying high-risk patients?
      • How is consent to be given, and what will happen to people who don’t give their consent?
      • What about those people who do not give consent because they are not able to?
    • Raises the fundamental question of the city’s role
      • If the city has information about a potential health risk and does not act upon the data, is the city guilty of negligence?
      • Are citizens treated equally in the physical and digital worlds?
      • If a person passes out in real life, we call an ambulance without having explicit permission to do so.
    • In the digital world, privacy concerns may prevent us from contacting citizens
  • If your answer is something like “yes, the city should seek an ethically and legally acceptable way to use those methods – there are so many advantages compared to the possible risks”, you were probably using a form of moral reasoning called "utilitarianism".

Ref. : Ethics of AI