South Korean Public Value Coproduction Towards ‘AI for Humanity’: A Synergy of Sociocultural Norms and Multistakeholder Deliberation in Bridging the Design and Implementation of National AI Ethics Guidelines

Abstract

As emerging technologies such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, and the Internet of Things (IoT) pose fundamental challenges for global and domestic technological governance, the‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (4IR) comes to the fore with AI as a frontrunner, generating discussions on the ethical elements of AI amongst key stakeholder groups, such as government, academia, industry, and civil society. However, in recent AI ethics and governance scholarship, AI ethics design appears to be divorced from AI ethics implementation, an implicit partition that results in two separate matters of theory and practice, respectively, and thus invokes efforts to bridge the‘gap’ between the two. Such a partition potentially overcomplicates the discussion surrounding AI ethics and limits its productivity. This paper thus presents South Korea’s people-centered‘National Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence Ethics’(국가인공지능윤리기준;‘Guidelines’) and their development under the Moon administration as a case study that can help readers conceptualize AI ethics design and implementation as a continuous process rather than a partitioned one.