WIREDGOV

techUK is excited to announce the publication of our latest report, ‘ Ethics in Action: Applying UK AI Ethics Principles to Immersive Environments’. 

In the evolving landscape of emerging technologies, the UK Government’s AI White Paper approach provides a foundation for responsible innovation that can be extended beyond traditional AI systems. There are five ethical principles underpinning this White Paper: safety, security and robustness; appropriate transparency and explainability; fairness; accountability and governance; and contestability and redress. These serve as a clear framework for what responsible technology development should achieve across diverse technical architectures, albeit operationalised in different ways.

This paper explores how these principles can be effectively applied to immersive environments, including those enabled by extended reality (XR) technologies, through the application of AI assurance techniques and standards.  

The development of a common ethical framework such as this, which is tech agnostic, supports consistent oversight across systems for organisations, many of which will have diverse technical architectures. This reduces the need to formulate distinct ethical principles for each modality and is particularly helpful in an environment of accelerating technology convergence. The immersive environments of the future will often exist at this convergence, for example with advances in device hardware such as high-quality augmented reality displays and lightweight haptics providing more authentic and engaging ways to experience AI-driven virtual content in real-world settings.  

The five principles outline the ethical outcomes that immersive systems could seek fulfil, while assurance techniques and standards offer concrete methods for demonstrating the extent to which a system has achieved these results in practice. This paper offers practical insights and examples of industry best practices and real-world scenarios, all of which have been provided to the authors by techUK member companies.This paper offers practical insights and examples of industry best practices and real-world scenarios, all of which have been provided to the authors by techUK member companies. These demonstrate the successful fulfilment of each principle in immersive contexts and illustrate how organisations might approach implementing these principles for extended reality and related technologies. 

Click here for the full press release