AI & Ethics

Mission Statement/Objectives
Alongside the rapid development and widespread application of AI across traditional industries, ethical issues have raised broad concerns regarding AI’s societal impacts, such as:  

- Uncertainty & Data Quality
- Black-Box Models (how decisions are made?)
- Bias & Fairness (due to origin of data used to train the model)
- Data Governance (privacy / IP / data ownership / traceability )
- Responsibility & Accountability (who is liable for errors)
- Human-in-the-Loop (how and which step?)
- Societal Impact (workforce change)
- Other long-term impact on people’s capacity

TG3.11 aims to address these concerns by defining

- Ethical principles
- Governance mechanisms
- Accountability structures

tailored to the engineering domain.

Missions of the TG3.11 include:

- Increase awareness of ethical and safety challenges in AI for civil engineering
- Identify, analyse, and prioritise risks and potential harms from AI use across engineering workflows
- Develop practical best-practice guidelines and advisory notes to support safe, responsible, and trustworthy AI adoption in engineering practice and policymaking

Scope & Limitation

A group of tasks will be carried out to achieve our mission:

Task 1: Raise Awareness — clarify ethical & safety challenges; make the community understand the problem

Task 2: Assess Risks — analyze potential harms; priorities key risks across engineering workflows

Task 3: Provide Guidelines & Policy Advice — propose best practices for engineers and recommendations for policymakers

Expected Project Output

From Task 1:

- A baseline awareness report or paper summarizing key issues and why they matter for engineering practice

From Task 2:

- A risk and impact assessment set (report and papers)
- A small-scale conference on the AI related ethical risks discussion
- Website / webpage to provide the information for public

From Task 3 (optional):

- Practical guidelines for engineers, firms, and operators
- Policy notes for higher-level decision makers and future standard-setting efforts

Start Date: 1 December 2025

Target Date of Completion: 1 December 2029

Chair
Xiaomeng Wang, Switzerland

Vice Chair

Members