Our AI ethics breakthrough stems from our strong safety culture

The Aletheia FrameworkTM – our breakthrough toolkit for trustworthy and ethical artificial intelligence – is something which has been borne out of the safety culture at Rolls-Royce.

We make products that carry people at more than 550mph at 35,000 feet; or that provide critical power to hospitals and data centres, ships and trains also with precious human cargo.

Those products have to be safe and that product safety culture is something that extends throughout our business.

Product safety culture is made up of an abundance of diligence, caution, open challenge, learning from experience, process and governance. And it’s these facets that have been applied by my colleagues and I to create The Aletheia FrameworkTM.

Building trust in AI requires organisations who seek to develop its technologies to have a strong ‘digital’ safety culture.

The Aletheia FrameworkTM is published for free in a downloadable worksheet form precisely so it can be used daily by any organisation which is seeking to create a benefit from using AI – and thereby create AI that is both ethical and trustworthy.

It is a step-by-step process that organisations can follow to ensure they have comprehensively considered AI’s impact on humans; to be able to give reassurance to their employees and communities that it has been followed; and to then continuously monitor the outputs from the AI to identify any bias or malfunction.

AI is often spoken about in terms of robots having control, but The Aletheia FrameworkTM is required because people have control. The benefits of AI to support the health, wealth and growth of society can only be accessed with the trust of people; and that can only be gained by people in organisations choosing to use The Aletheia FrameworkTM to demonstrate they have a world-class safety culture.