The AI Book

CHAPTER 48Independent AI Ethics Committees and ESG Corporate Reporting on AI as Emerging Corporate and AI Governance Trends

By Brian W. Tang¹

¹Founder, ACMI and LITE Lab@HKU

Innovation lies at the heart of all thriving civilizations. While freedom to innovate and free markets are often viewed as paramount, a line is universally drawn when it comes to research and experimentation on human subjects.

Independent Human Research Review Committees (IHRCs)

Doctors worldwide are trained to follow the Hippocratic oath to “first do no harm”. Yet the Nazi human experiment atrocities were “crimes…not simply the actions of individual doctors, but involved leading members of the medical community…and should be taken as a warning for the future”.¹ After the scandalous Tuskegee Study gave unsuspecting African-American males syphilis, the 1974 US National Research Act required institutional review boards (IRBs) to approve all federally funded research under the Common Rule for the Protection of Human Subjects. Significantly, its resultant 1978 Belmont Report outlined three ethical principles:

1. Respect for Persons – informed consent being essential.
2. Beneficence – to maximize benefit and minimize risk.
3. Justice – to ensure fair selection of participants.

These principles have formed the basis of human science research worldwide,² including non-clinical behavioural and social science experiments.³

However, IHRCs and their regulation have difficulty grappling with internet research ethics,