Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Richard Veryard In many contexts (such as healthcare) interoperability is considered to be a Good Thing. Johns and Stead argue that “we have an ethical obligation to develop and implement plug-and-play clinical devices and information technology syst…
It is difficult to see how we can achieve an ethical technology without some kind of transparency, although we are still trying to work out how this could be achieved in an effective yet responsible manner. There are several concerns that are t…
In 2001-2, Julia Black published some papers discussing the concept of Decentred Regulation, with particular relevance to the challenges of globalization. In this post, I shall summarize her position as I understand it, and apply it to the topic of res…
@Greg_Travis has written an article on the Boeing 737 Max Disaster, which @jjn1 describes as “one of the best pieces of technical writing I’ve seen in ages”. He explains why normal airplane design includes redundant sensors. “There are two sets of angl…
Although ethical principles have been put forward by philosophers through the ages, the first person to articulate ethical principles for information technology was Norbert Wiener. In his book The Human Use of Human Beings, first published in 1950, …
Dr @BenGoldacre was the keynote speaker at an IT conference I attended recently. In the context of the growing interest in technology ethics, especially AI ethics, I asked him what IT could learn from medical ethics. He responded by criticising the rol…
@bengoldacre provides some useful commentary on a BBC news item about statins. In particular, he notes a detail from the original research paper that didn’t make it into the BBC news item – namely the remarkable lack of agreement between GPs and hospit…
We can roughly characterize two places where ethical judgements are called for, which I shall call upstream and downstream. There is some inconsistency about how these terms are used in the literature; here are my definitions.I use the term upstream et…
How much knowledge is required, in order to make a proper ethical judgement?Assuming that consequences matter, it would obviously be useful to be able to reason about the consequences. This is typically a combination of inductive reasoning (what has ha…
Professor Luciano @Floridi has recently introduced the concept of Soft Ethics. He wants to make a distinction between ethical judgements that go into laws, regulations and other norms, which he calls Hard Ethics, and ethical judgements that apply and e…
@shoshanazuboff’s latest book was published at the end of January. 700 pages of detailed research and analysis, and I’ve been trying to read as much as possible before everyone else. Meanwhile I have seen display copies everywhere – not just at the ICA…
The term “framework” is much abused. Here’s a statement picked at random from the Internet:”By bringing these key aspects together on a process-oriented strategy, organizations are able to acquire agility and improve the ability to engage on a much mor…