Abstract
This paper describes IEEE P7001, a new draft standard on transparency of autonomous systems 1 . In the paper, we outline the development and structure of the draft standard. We present the rationale for transparency as a measurable, testable property. We outline five stakeholder groups: users, the general public and bystanders, safety certification agencies, incident/accident investigators and lawyers/expert witnesses, and explain the thinking behind the normative definitions of “levels” of transparency for each stakeholder group in P7001. The paper illustrates the application of P7001 through worked examples of both specification and assessment of fictional autonomous systems.
Highlights
There is broad agreement in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robot ethics community about the need for autonomous and intelligent systems to be transparent; a survey of ethical guidelines in AI (Jobin et al, 2019) reveals that transparency is the most frequently included ethical principle, appearing in 73 of the 84 (87%) sets of guidelines surveyed
It follows that P7001 is written as an “umbrella” standard, with definitions of transparency that are generic and applicable to a wide range of applications regardless of whether they are based on algorithmic control approaches or machine learning
When one considers that the degree to which an end user can understand how a system operates will depend a great deal on the way that user documentation is presented and accessed; or the extent to which an accident investigator can discover the factors that led up to an accident can vary from impossible to a very detailed timeline of events, it becomes clear that transparency can be expressed as a set of testable thresholds
Summary
There is broad agreement in the AI and robot ethics community about the need for autonomous and intelligent systems to be transparent; a survey of ethical guidelines in AI (Jobin et al, 2019) reveals that transparency is the most frequently included ethical principle, appearing in 73 of the 84 (87%) sets of guidelines surveyed. We introduce the five stakeholder groups in P7001: users, the general public and bystanders, safety certification agencies, incident/accident investigators and lawyers/expert witnesses For each of these stakeholders, we outline the structure of the normative definitions of “levels” of transparency. We will illustrate the application of P7001 through worked examples of both the specification (STS) and assessment (STA) of fictional autonomous systems.
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