AI Ethics in Russia and the European Union: Commonalities in Risk-Oriented Approaches

Socio-economic transformation propelled by digital technologies has drawn increased attention to ethical aspects of the creation and application of artificial intelligence. Priorities and directions of AI technologies development are fixed in a range of strategic documents both in the Russian Federation and in the European Union. The article highlights several common features of risk-oriented approaches of Russia and the EU to the development, implementation, and use ofAI on the example of two documents published in 2021 - the Code of Ethics in the Field of Artificial Intelligence and the Proposal for a Regulation Laying Down Harmonised Rules on Artificial Intelligence. The author analyzes the documents following a set of criteria: human-centricity and humanism; degrees of risk; the system of interaction of AI actors, and the role of self-regulation in it; reliance on expert knowledge; the tendency for the evolution of "soft law" into more binding norms. The results of the study reveal a few commonalities between the Russian and European risk-oriented approaches to AI ethics (formal and substantive differences are not the object of analysis in this article). It is concluded that ethical regulation is a way state and non-state actors respond to global technological risks associated with artificial intelligence. It harmoniously complements the development of legal regulation and reduces uncertainty for all AI actors, as it defines the scope of permissible anthropological and other humanitarian consequences of their actions at a high level of generalization.