Engineering Trustworthy AI: A Developer Guide for Empirical Risk Minimization

AI systems used for important decisions often rely on empirical risk minimization (ERM, a training method that reduces prediction errors on known data) to build models, but these systems can suffer from unintentional bias, lack of transparency, and other risks. The EU has established Ethics Guidelines requiring trustworthy AI to meet seven key requirements, yet current ERM-based design prioritizes accuracy over trustworthiness. This article argues that developers need to balance four core objectives when designing AI systems: fairness (not discriminating against groups), privacy (protecting user data), robustness (resisting intentional attacks like fake news), and explainability (being transparent about how decisions are made).