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The Different Faces of AI Ethics Across the World: A Principle-Implementation Gap Analysis

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming our daily life with several applications in healthcare, space exploration, banking and finance. These rapid progresses in AI have brought increasing attention to the potential impacts of AI technologies on society, with ethically questionable consequences. In recent years, several ethical principles have been released by governments, national and international organisations. These principles outline high-level precepts to guide the ethical development, deployment, and governance of AI. However, the abstract nature, diversity, and context-dependency of these principles make them difficult to implement and operationalize, resulting in gaps between principles and their execution. Most recent work analysed and summarized existing AI principles and guidelines but they did not provide findings on principle-implementation gaps and how to mitigate them. These findings are particularly important to ensure that AI implementations are aligned with ethical principles and values. In this paper, we provide a contextual and global evaluation of current ethical AI principles for all continents, with the aim to identify potential principle characteristics tailored to specific countries or applicable across countries. Next, we analyze the current level of AI readiness and current implementations of ethical AI principles in different countries, to identify gaps in the implementation of AI principles and their causes. Finally, we propose recommendations to mitigate the principle-implementation gaps.