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I was involved in a debate this week, concerning whether ethical principles and standards should include weapons systems, or whether military purposes should be explicitly excluded.On both sides of the debate, there were people who strongly disapproved…
Last week I was in Berlin at the invitation of the IEEE to help develop standards for responsible technology (P7000). One of the working groups (P7001) is looking at transparency, especially in relation to autonomous and semi-autonomous systems. In thi…
Many people start their journey into the ethics of automation and robotics by looking at Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm (etc. etc.)As I’ve said before, I believe …
Some people think that ethical principles only apply to implemented systems, and that experimental projects (trials, proofs of concept, and so on) don’t need the same level of transparency and accountability.Last year, Google employees (as well as US s…
What does #TechnologyEthics look like from the viewpoint of your average ethics professor? Not surprisingly, many ethics professors believe strongly in the value of ethics education, and advocate ethics awareness training for business managers and eng…
In my ongoing work on #TechnologyEthics. I have identified Five Elements of Responsibility by Design. One of these elements is what I’m calling the Activity View – defining effective and appropriate action at different points in the lifecycle of a tech…
Professor Luciano Floridi has recently made clear his opposition to irresponsible beta testing, by which he means “trying something without exactly knowing what one is doing, to see what happens, on people who may not have volunteered to be the subject…
I have been developing an approach to #TechnologyEthics, which I call #ResponsibilityByDesign. It is based on the five elements of #VPECT. Let me start with a high-level summary before diving into some of the detail.
Values
Policies
Event-Driven (Activity Viewpoint)
Content (Knowledge Viewpoint)
Trust (Responsibility Viewpoint)
Concerning technology ethics, there is a lot of recent published material on each of these elements separately, but I have not yet found much work that puts them together in a satisfactory way. Many working groups concentrate on a single element – for example, principles or transparency. And even when experts link multiple elements, the logical connections aren’t always spelled out.
At the time of writing this post (May 2019), I haven’t yet fully worked out how to join these elements either, and I shall welcome constructive feedback from readers and pointers to good work elsewhere. I am also keen to find opportunities to trial these ideas on real projects.
Related Posts
Responsibility by Design (June 2018) What is Responsibility by Design (October 2018) Why Responsibility by Design Now? (October 2018)
As I said in my previous post, I don’t think we can start to think about the ethics of technology nudges without recognizing the complexity of real-world nudges. So in this post, I shall look at how nudges are communicated in the real world, before con…
Before we can discuss the ethics of technologically mediated nudge, we need to recognize that many of the ethical issues are the same whether the nudge is delivered by a human or a robot. So let me start by trying to identify different categories of nu…
@j2bryson has commented on her blog about the fate of Google’s Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), to which she had been appointed.She argues that the people who were appointed to the ATEAC were selected because they were “promine…
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…