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The Ethical Machine: AI Ethics, Accountability, and Governance for Practitioners
Paperback
Business GeneralManagementGeneral Computers
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 11 2026
Pages: 132
Weight: 0.41
Height: 0.28 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
THE ETHICAL MACHINE: AI Ethics, Accountability, and Governance for Practitioners Prof. Samer Barakat
Artificial intelligence is making consequential decisions about real people every day. Who gets the loan. Who advances to the next hiring round. Who receives the clinical intervention. Who is flagged by the algorithm. And in most of the organizations deploying these systems, one question remains largely unanswered: what do we owe the people our AI affects?
The Ethical Machine is the book that takes that question seriously.
Written by Prof. Samer Barakat - Professor of MIS and Digital Business at Applied Science Private University and founder of Sigma AI Consulting - this is a rigorous, practitioner-grade framework for AI ethics that bridges the gap between academic philosophy and real institutional decision-making. It is the required reference text for the IFPASA AI Ethical Certification (AIEC), and the companion volume to The Governance Gap in the Sigma Series.
What this book argues
AI ethics is not a compliance exercise. It is not a risk management function. It is not a values statement on a website. It is a decision discipline - a structured professional practice that imposes genuine moral obligations on everyone who builds or deploys systems that shape other people's lives.
Those obligations are organized around an original framework: the Sigma AI Ethics Evaluation Model (SAEEM), developed from peer-reviewed research published through SSRN. SAEEM evaluates AI deployments across five weighted dimensions - Justification, Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Sustainability - providing the analytical structure practitioners need to move from principles to defensible decisions.
What this book covers
Part One establishes the foundations: what AI ethics actually is, five major ethical frameworks (consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, contractarianism, and the maqasid al-shariah tradition), the concept of irreducible human authority, and the structural reality of power asymmetry - when AI systems fail, the people harmed are almost never the people who built them.
Part Two develops SAEEM across four critical dimensions: bias and fairness, transparency and accountability, privacy and data sovereignty, and the global regulatory landscape including the EU AI Act, UNESCO, OECD, ISO 42001, and regional frameworks from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore.
Part Three applies the framework to healthcare, finance, education, and the legal profession - addressing the clinical boundary problem, algorithmic exclusion, Islamic finance ethics, student rights, academic integrity, and the professional judgment standard in law.
Part Four is the working toolkit: the Sigma Ethics Audit Framework (SEAF), a six-step audit methodology; ethics review board design; the full AIEC competency map; and the Sigma AI Ethics Practitioner's Pledge.
Who this book is for
This book is for the AI product manager who wants to know whether what they are building is genuinely defensible. The legal professional evaluating AI systems without a framework. The compliance officer whose ethics program produces documentation rather than ethics. The board member providing oversight of systems they do not fully understand. The professional pursuing AIEC certification.
This is your required reference text - written to give you not just the knowledge to pass the examination, but the analytical capacity to practice what the certification represents.
About the author
Prof. Samer Barakat is a Professor of MIS and Digital Business at Applied Science Private University, Amman, Jordan, and founder of Sigma AI Consulting. His research is published through SSRN. He is the author of The Governance Gap (Sigma Series, Volume I) and developer of the Sigma AI platform ecosystem at sigma-ai-consulting.com.
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