Facility management faces new opportunities and challenges through the emerging solutions of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. With powerful technologies, great responsibility follows. Ethics of AI technologies has been recognized as an essential field of research and an integral part of applying AI. By creating an ethical framework, we can ensure both ethically aligned conduct and efficient and innovative adoption of AI technologies in facility management.
Facility management faces new opportunities and challenges through the emerging solutions of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Facility management is defined as a multidisciplinary field ensuring functionality, comfort, safety and efficiency in the built environments (IFMA, 2020). The rise of AI technologies attaches to the continuum of digitalization and thus is the other grand challenge of facility management’s future along with sustainability (Bröchner et al., 2019).
With powerful technologies, great responsibility follows. Ethics of AI technologies has been recognized as an essential field of research and an integral part of applying AI. By creating an applied ethical framework, we can ensure both ethically aligned conduct and efficient and innovative adoption of AI technologies in facility management. The utilization of AI technologies in facility management does not necessarily need own ethical principles or guidelines, but applying existing principles to the field’s challenges and use cases can offer fruitful and strengthened insights for the debate of applied AI ethics.
Ethics of AI is not an overriding field in ethics but adheres to the tradition of
information technology ethics. Many themes debated might be familiar from the earlier
experiences and ethical implications of digital and information technology, big data,
analytics, and modeling systems. However, ethics of AI forms a vital development of
ethical analysis and thinking, and thus awareness towards the field’s themes and
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concerns can be crucial for the practitioners and scholars of facility management.
Knowing the topics of ethics of AI can help to form an overall ethical awareness, called
for by
AI technology can impact facility management’s structure, business logic,
organization, and culture thoroughly. To clarify the starting points of this paper, the
term of facility management refers to the definition by
Possible application areas of AI in FM include security robots, control and
surveillance systems, autonomous guidance, catering and cleaning, and intelligent
maintenance applications.
The definition of AI by the European High-Level Expert Group is a good starting point: “Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to systems that display intelligent behaviour by analysing their environment and taking actions – with some degree of autonomy – to achieve specific goals.
The report “Artificial intelligence: What it means for
Several ethics report and ethical frameworks has been published about the emerging
AI technologies. To mention a few: IEEE published Ethically Aligned Design (2018);
After the formulation of principles and guidelines, even more critical phase is the following: how to start bringing the guidelines alive and integrating principle-level conduct to the practice. Ethical assessment and evaluation, ethics by design, and organization-wide awareness of ethical issues related to AI technologies become the key issues. The humble but profound goal of this paper is to bring a first few thoughts and ideas about those key issues to the discipline of facility management.
AI is a general-purpose technological change, and it will dramatically affect
most industries. When approaching industry-specific ethical alignment, the first step
could be the transformation of general and high-level guidelines to suit the
industryspecific requirements. For the level of ethical alignment in AI solutions, an example
can be found from the earlier sustainability thinking.
As Michael
The European Guidelines for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence offers a good opportunity to adapt the presented ethical principles and requirements into more practical sector. While the research literature bursts over with the overall level principles of ethical AI, industry-specific application and conceptualization of these principles should be greeted with joy.
The European High Level Expert Group’s report “Ethical Guidelines for Trustworthy AI” describes seven high-level principles and ethical categories as the key requirements of ethical AI. Writing these principles open and reflecting them to the field of facility management, it is possible to find key remarks and control points for ensuring ethical AI in facility management. The following key points from the report seem to be important to ask and analyze also when it comes to facility management:
AI solutions should promote fundamental rights and support human autonomy. AI technologies offer powerful tools for the implementor, and their use should be assessed and monitored to minimize the possibility of misuse, e.g. violating the right to privacy or discrimating based on age or gender, abilities or characteristics when it is not justified. Another essential point is to ensure human oversight: although the autonomy level of AI solutions rises, we must ensure the capability for human intervention and control of all the AI systems. 4
To some extent, we have to rely on it that technology vendors pursue technical robustness, but buyer-side evaluation is necessary as well. What is the skill set needed for evaluation of technical robustness and safety? Do the facility management community and facility managers have enough knowledge, insight and experience for the evaluation? We need to ensure that they do or can find suitable people to do so.
Technological development during the past decades has challenged our right to
privacy. The implementors of technology solutions are extensively capable of
collecting data about us. AI technologies increase these capabilities and reinforce the
ability to build a wide range of applications on top of the collected data. Defending
privacy can easily conflict with other purposes: As described by
Transparency includes traceability, explainability and strong call for communication. How to enable transparent conduct to all technology solutions? How to use co-creation to involve all the stakeholders? Transparency has been recognized as an essential principle in various ethical guidelines and codes, but in practice, achieving transparent organization culture and practices seems difficult. Are your organization’s facility managers prepared to be transparent in the planning and implementation of AI solutions? And most importantly, are they prepared to be transparent if the AI solutions fail?
AI technologies make some of our societies’ biases and injustices visible, and AI
solutions should be monitored against discriminating effects. For example, facial and
object recognition systems might recognize white male persons better than anyone else
AI solutions should promote societal and environmental wellbeing. How is facility management answering to the societal challenges of AI technologies? How to optimize workplaces to human-robot-interaction? Virtual and augmented reality offers efficiency for meeting and face-to-face collaboration, but how to ensure socially viable environment for work and life?
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Who will be responsible and accountable? For a data breach? Security failures or safety issues? Mistakes in access control or recognition systems discrimating certain population groups? Accountability and responsibility should be negotiated and agreed clearly in every AI implementation. Accountability should be communicated clearly, and responsibility should be real, not vanishing under bureaucracy. 3
Empirical interview research will follow this conceptual paper. The empirical research consists semi-structured interviews with three to five leading Finnish facility or real estate managers with knowledge and ability to answer technology-related questions about their field. The brief empirical research will be conducted during the autumn 2020.
The empirical part of the study targets to answer the following questions: Which AI systems or applications are used in the facility management sector now and in 3-5 years? How well the conceptualizations presented in this paper land to describe the possible ethical challenges of applying AI in facility and real estate management? What could the concrete form and the intended use of the ethical framework an ethical framework for applying artificial intelligence in facility management? 4
We are still in the phase where the facility management community sorts out and plans how and where to utilize AI solutions. Ethics must emerge alongside these concerns from the beginning, and industry-specific ethical guidelines should be defined and agreed together with the community so that ethical concerns are solved with the introduction of the technology, rather than added as a band-aid after implementation. Strong ethical alignment will likely result in the most valuable, societally viable and long-lasting achievements.
In the AI ethics community, we are moving to analyze and solve how to integrate the ethical guidelines as well as possible to the practices in the more specific industries affected by AI. Technology industry should carry a strong responsibility for the emerging technologies, but other industries should follow the ethical conduct when integrating AI technology to their everyday solutions. This paper functions as a start of the debate and analysis.
Ethics of AI is not about mystical fear-mongering, but about the challenging transformation affecting most industries. Awareness about the themes and concerns of AI ethics helps to integrate ethical thinking to the existing models of handling innovation, change and professional conduct. Innovation, change and professionality are core themes for facility management, and aligning AI ethics to the themes and the discipline itself is compulsory. 6 5
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