Ethics by design in cutting-edge tech development
While emerging technologies often bring important social, economic and environmental benefits, their development and use can also raise significant ethical concerns and questions. What if it leads to widespread job losses and the need to reskill workers, or creates new data breaches and vulnerabilities for cybercriminals to exploit? To address these concerns, prioritising ethics and societal values in the design, development and deployment of new technologies is a critical consideration. The TechEthos project sought to provide guidance on how this can be achieved. “For the first six months, we analysed and identified new and emerging technologies with high economic and ethical relevance,” explains project coordinator Eva Buchinger, a sociologist at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology. “We ended up focusing on three areas of innovation that interact with the planet, with the digital world, and with the body.”
Weather control
The first technology of focus was climate engineering, covering innovations designed to help mitigate the impacts of climate change such as carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation modification. Ethical concerns surrounding these technologies include regulation, social inequality, environmental impacts and the imposition of innovations on communities. A second area was extended reality, advanced computing systems that change how people connect with one another and their surroundings. Key ethical concerns here include content manipulation, and the dangers of digital responses that are indistinguishable from human reality. Finally, the team looked at the ethical considerations surrounding neurotechnologies, for example, brain computer interfaces for control of prosthetic devices. Ethical concerns include ensuring that humans retain their free will and autonomy, along with privacy issues regarding sensitive data.
Gauging societal awareness levels
The project team next examined issues such as societal awareness levels and key regulatory issues. Existing guidelines were analysed in order to identify gaps and put forward suggestions, while a major emphasis was placed on citizen interaction. The ethical, legal and societal analyses conducted on the three technologies are accessible on the project website, along with fact sheets summarising the findings. Around 15 science cafes were held across the six project partner countries, and the TechEthos game developed, with the aim of capturing societal attitudes, values and concerns. “More than 700 citizens were involved in total,” says Buchinger. These initiatives resulted in important key insights. The team found that people’s concern was not so much about the technology itself, but rather about who is responsible for implementation and oversight. “Citizens are trusting so long as someone is taking responsibility,” notes Buchinger. “We didn’t expect this sentiment to come out so clearly.” Citizens also expressed concern that decisions are too often driven by financial or populist interests, at the expense of people and the planet. “These findings underline the importance of having independent research ethics bodies in place, to act as intermediaries,” adds Buchinger.
Integrating ethics into tech design
Among the results of the project is the TechEthos Anticipatory ethics Matrix (TEAeM), a detailed framework that supports the effective governance of new technologies using a combination of existing frameworks such as ATE Plus, the Ethical Impact Assessment and a Future Studies approach. The project website offers suggestions for the revision of existing operational guidelines for climate engineering, neurotechnologies and digital extended reality technologies, and the Social Readiness Tool. The team also contributed to the revision of the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity released in June 2023.
Keywords
TechEthos, ethics, technologies, climate, neurotechnologies, environmental, cybercriminals, extended reality, climate engineering
