Ethics and Artificial Intelligence in Public Health Social Work

David Gray Grant

Abstract: Autonomous software agents based on artificial intelligence have many potential applications at the intersection of public health and social work, known as public health social work. These applications are enormously promising, but often pose novel ethical problems for researchers that can be difficult to assess, much less to resolve. The aim of this chapter is to show how analytical tools from moral philosophy and theoretical computer science can be combined to better understand these problems and to develop strategies for addressing them in practice. I will focus on a specific set of problems that arise in the development of public health social work interventions based on artificial intelligence. Specifically, I will focus on a class of problems that I will call “beneficence problems.” Beneficence problems occur in the context of public health social work interventions that are partially planned, in the field, with the help of an artificially intelligent autonomous software agent (call these AI planning interventions).