The Ethics and Governance of Government Digital Humans: An Analysis of Public Attitudes Based on the Q Method

As the latest application of artificial intelligence technology in government services, government digital humans have reshaped government services while also triggering some ethical discussions. The public’s attitude towards the ethics of government digital humans has become the key to responding to ethical issues and improving governance measures. For this purpose, this study invited the public in Chengdu to participate in the survey and adopted the Q method to analyze the public’s ethical attitude towards government digital humans. The research finds that the public’s ethical attitudes towards government digital humans present five types, namely, the rights and interests protection type, the value orientation type, the human-oriented control type, the institutional regulation type, and the technological reality type of ethics. Further exploration reveals that these attitudes have significant differences in the positioning of technical functions and the maintenance of human dignity, but have reached a basic consensus on the essential boundaries between humans and machines. This study finds that the public’s ethical attitudes towards government digital humans are complex, interwoven with rights, values, subjectivity, standardization and practicality. Based on this, the “differentiated technical path” and the “hierarchical governance framework” are proposed. It is suggested to optimize the technical design and build a hierarchical, updatable and participatory governance system to achieve precise governance and dynamic balance of the ethics of government digital humans. This study answers the question of how the public views the ethics of government digital humans, providing empirical evidence for the construction of a governance norm that integrates “technology—ethics—system”, and facilitating the ethical sustainability and social acceptance of government digital humans.