Trinity Corporate Governance Lab to tackle AI’s ethical dilemmas

Dr Daniel Malan, assistant professor in Business Ethics and director of the Trinity Corporate Governance Lab. Photo: Paul Sharp/SHARPPIX

Donal O'Donovan

Trinity Business School has launched a new Trinity Corporate Governance Lab, which it says intends to define corporate governance best practice for the next decade.

Governance has become a major focus for investors as the ‘G’ in environmental, social and governance (ESG), while so-called frontier technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are throwing up new ethical dilemmas.

Generative AI start-up, OpenAI, has become a case in point, where board level clashes have been characterised as a battle between financial imperatives to growth the business and ethical concerns around how far and fast the technology can safely develop.

Trinity Corporate Governance Lab will deliver innovative, collaborative projects and research in the areas of corporate governance and business ethics.

The lab is a spin-out of the Trinity Centre for Social Innovation and will work closely with the Trinity Centre for Digital Business and Analytics.

Currently, the lab is responsible for the Trinity Business Ethics Speaker Series and also plans to introduce an “Executive in Residence” programme as well as other offerings in the executive education space.

Business advisory firm FTI Consulting has been announced as its inaugural knowledge partner, with Mason Hayes & Curran on board as its second knowledge partner.

The project is being launched today at an event at Trinity Business School, with Dr Stephen Davis, senior fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance, providing a keynote speech.

Research projects at the new lab will include Frontier Technology, Corporate Moral Progress – which aims to identify the responsibility of firms, explore the sources of their immorality and chart a path for their improvement; and Socially Acceptable and Fair AI, which proposes to develop a methodology for the design of fair AI applications.

Dr Daniel Malan, assistant professor in Business Ethics and director of the Trinity Corporate Governance Lab, said the lab will provide a platform to integrate governance and business ethics into the delivery of research and world-class education.

“The Lab is perfectly aligned with the Business School strategy... and we look forward to work with our academic and industry partners to have real impact,” he said.