I am pleased to share that I have joined the EXTRA-BRAIN project as an Independent Ethics Advisor.
Working within this initiative has reinforced a key insight: ethics in artificial intelligence is not about applying all principles equally in every context. It requires prioritisation, careful trade-offs, and adapting requirements to specific use cases.
In a complex, real-world project such as EXTRA-BRAIN, these tensions become particularly visible – especially when balancing innovation, performance, and compliance with frameworks such as the HLEG Guidelines on Trustworthy AI, as well as regulatory regimes including the AI Act and GDPR.
At the same time, there is an important boundary that must not be crossed. Trade-offs in practice cannot justify the abandonment of ethical design in favour of efficiency or speed.
The central challenge is therefore more demanding – and more interesting: integrating ethics in a way that actively enables innovation. When properly embedded into the design and development process, ethics does not slow systems down. Instead, it contributes to building solutions that are:
✔ more robust
✔ more transparent
✔ and ultimately more trustworthy
This perspective is particularly relevant for the future of AI development. If artificial intelligence is to scale responsibly in real-world applications, ethics cannot function as an external constraint. It must become an integral part of how systems are designed, developed, and deployed.
