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This paper conducts a sociotechnical analysis of historical disasters to extract lessons applicable to the development and deployment of AI systems, emphasizing that many risks are known yet ignored due to socio-political factors. By examining catastrophic events like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the authors argue for a shift from a purely technical focus to a systems-level understanding of AI risks, advocating for improved risk communication and organizational responsibility. The key finding is that integrating social dynamics into engineering practices can significantly enhance the safety and reliability of AI technologies by preventing the recurrence of past mistakes.
Ignoring the social dynamics that led to past disasters could doom AI systems to repeat history's mistakes.
As automated decision-making and data-driven technologies pervade society and are used to manage consequential outcomes, understanding the technology's capabilities, limitations, and attendant risks in context requires analysis of full sociotechnical systems. Sociotechnical analysis of risks in highly complex systems provides clear lessons for the design and evaluation of AI systems, transcending a technical focus on reliable or"responsibly designed"components to understand risks at a systems level. Human-made catastrophes have been studied for decades because of the severity of these events: consider Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima-Daiichi, Bhopal, the Challenger disaster. A common misconception is that these kinds of events are freak accidents, resulting from the inherently unforeseeable interactions in complex systems. Closer examination reveals that the risks and hazards were well-known beforehand but not acted upon due to social structural, political and economic factors. We outline several areas where the development and use of AI can benefit from learning these unlearned lessons: improved risk perception, communication, and analysis at the organizational level; traceability of requirements and responsibilities; and holistic approaches to responsibility and safety that include social and organizational dynamics as first-order engineering concerns. For each area, we offer concrete unlearned lessons and exemplify how they led to failure in prior accidents as well as examples of how these lessons remain unlearned for modern computing systems, particularly AI.
Google Research