Achieving this vision will benefit citizens and consumers and strengthen trust in AI systems.

These pages explain how the SHERPA project outlines the SHERPA recommendations to achieve it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a set of powerful technologies that affect most countries, organisations and individuals. Like all technologies, AI can be used for different purposes. AI holds the potential to hugely benefit individuals and society, for example, AI can help to better understand and cure diseases, to revolutionize transport, to optimize business processes or reduce carbon emissions. At the same time, AI raises many ethical and social concerns, ranging from worries about biases and resulting discrimination to the distribution of socio-economic and political power and their impact on democracy.

The recommendations promoted here are meant to ensure that AI supports human flourishing. This means that the consequence of AI development and use allow individual human beings to live their lives freely and achieve their potential. This means that AI supports and strengthens human rights and that ethical issues raised by AI can be addressed. Human flourishing requires the protection of the individual person, but also calls for the support of social structures which are required for individuals to achieve their potential.

AI consists of many different types of technology which are developed, deployed and used by an array of different stakeholders. It is therefore helpful to think about AI in terms of an ecosystem of interlinked stakeholders, technologies and processes.

These recommendations are based on the view of AI as a set of interlinking ecosystems. AI cannot be envisaged in terms of one particular technology, one clearly defined application area or one individual or organisation. AI is based on and required many components, which include technical, but also social and organisational ones.

In order to represent this complexity of stakeholders, technologies and application areas, the metaphor of an ecosystem is widely used to describe AI. These recommendations take this metaphor seriously and propose ways in which AI ecosystems can be shaped to ensure they are beneficial to people, uphold human rights and, more generally, promote human flourishing.