In this interview, Katja Rausch, Founder of The House of Ethics™, shares how they’re transforming AI ethics. Through innovative approaches like Swarm Ethics™, they help companies integrate responsible AI frameworks, ensuring technology serves humanity’s best interests.
The main mission of The House of Ethics™ ?
As of Nov 2022, with the launch of a hallucinating ChatGPT, the world of AI ethics (and regulation) has been turned upside down. Ever since ethics applied to AI is no longer is viewed as a distant philosophical concept but has become a crucial necessity to any company.
Our commitment at The House of Ethics™ is to ease the practice, alignment and integration of ethics into business practices and processes. To democratise ethics as a thinking pattern embedded throughout a company’s DNA, its products and services, and mostly with C-level executives and operational teams.
We help companies and executives develop cross-functional cyber-ethics and risk programs and shape their own ethical frameworks to comply with existing regulations such as the AI EU Act, OECD, NIST, and UN guidelines combined to their in-house corporate policies.
We support businesses with a responsible integration of AI ethics into their products, services and processes, in a context of automation, agentic or multi-agentic AI, as well as any decentralized architectures.
Where to start? The entry level is easy : push the door of The House of Ethics™ and talk to us. Let us help you get the right level of AI literacy, before designing resilient and responsible AI ethics programs and frameworks. Only this way can companies turn ethics into a solid competitive advantage and revenue generator.
How does the think thank The House of Ethics™ promote applied AI ethics ?
The House of Ethics™ is not a promoter of ethics, but an ethics integrator. We are committed to the kind of AI ethics where sharing, caring and empowering, transparency, accountability and responsibility are key ethical indicators.
With our interdisciplinary team, Prof. Dr. Ingrid Vasiliu-Feltes, Daniele Proverbio and a pool of cross-disciplinary experts we offer easy to use frameworks and focus on exchanges rather than stiff monologues. We see conferences as the perfect public knowledge sharing platforms to nurture and vivify the ethical mindset through interdisciplinary debates on AI ethics accessible to everybody.
We also offer an open access platform with articles by industry experts and academics in a non-academic style, and showcase interviews in our The House of Ethics™ TALK Series. Just recently we launched the Researcher’s Corner moderated by Daniele Proverbio where post-docs and researchers are invited to share their latest work on AI ethics and human rights.
How would you explain the novel and innovative concept of Swarm Ethics™ developed by The House of Ethics™ ?
Swarm Ethics™ has been developed in 2022 by Daniele Proverbio, Director of Interdisciplinary Research and myself, and introduced as the first ever interdisciplinary concept of collective and decentralized ethics applied to AI at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
Compared to traditional ethics, which is individual, conceptual, and hard-coded, Swarm Ethics™ on the contrary leans on collective swarm intelligence. It is collective, practical, emerging through interactions and addresses ethics from a systemic side with hyperconnectivity as a key driver.
With Swarm Ethics™ people navigate together like a swarm through complex and uncertain environments posing many conundrums and ethical challenges. By using collective decision-making based on consensus the group, team or community as a system becomes more resilients and agile in uncertain environments.
Swarm Ethics™ is participatory and emerging ethics, perfectly fit for agile project management, fast-paced and complex technologies and decentralized architectures in the digital age. Our co-founder of Swarm Ethics™ Prof. Dr. Ingrid Vasiliu-Feltes is a pioneer in applying collective decentralized ethics to web3, quantum AI and digital twins.
What is your objective for the cycle of three conferences you are organizing on Ethics & AI in Luxembourg ?
Our objective is three-fold : first, raise the awareness that ethics no longer is a hobby but has become a necessity for any business, big or small. Second, introduce the The House of Ethics™ as the reference for interdisciplinary AI ethics in Luxembourg and main hub to get a full-service on ethics applied to AI. And finally, democratise ethics and make it part of the everyday business life as an intuitive practice made by people, for people and with people.
According to you, what are future major challenges of AI ethics?
The major challenges of AI ethics are to anticipate the swift cascading developments of emerging and frontier technologies instead of being bypassed. As we are entering uncharted terrains with streamlined automated decision-making at high speed, we need to make sure that the center piece of the tech revolution remains us humans.
As robotics with physical AI will challenge the human-machine relation, as well as Brain Computer Interfacing and neuromorphic computing will be running on decentralized architectures powered by quantum AI, we need to keep track and trace ethical blindspots.
And ask fundamental systemic questions beyond transparency, equity, responsibility such as How do we prevent that humans will not be outpaced by their own creations ? How can we protect human fundamentals and harness social harms in the race to AI ? All for one purpose-oriented ethics benefiting innovation, sustainability and safety.
