Final Report Summary - ETICA (Ethical Issues of Emerging ICT Applications)
Executive summary:
The ETICA project identified ethical issues of emerging ICT applications. The project highlighted 11 technologies which are: Affective computing, Ambient intelligence, Artificial intelligence, Bioelectronics, Cloud computing, Future internet, Human/machine symbiosis, Neuroelectronics, Quantum computing, Robotics and Virtual / Augmented Reality. It also described ethical issues related to these technologies. Furthermore, the project described the methodology used to arrive at these findings. On the basis of the identified technologies and their ethical aspects, the ETICA project evaluated and ranked them. It investigated current and possible ways of implementing governance that are conducive to addressing the ethics of emerging ICTs.
The project put forward recommendations which specifically address policy makers as formulators of regulatory frameworks who ought to consider ethics in ICTs, particularly as they emerge. Another set of recommendations were developed for industry, researchers and civil society organisations (CSOs) who are innovators and users and therefore who ought to be proactive in their consideration of ethics and ICTs.
ETICA has significant impact, both academically and in terms of policy development. The project has essentially contributed to how ethics of emerging technologies may be identified and in the process aid in technology development especially at European level. This has been particularly through wider stakeholder engagement and consultation as seen from the collaborative ETICA/STOA Parliamentary Event in Brussels as well as through the EU training event with personnel closely linked to ethics and ICTs. ETICA findings will support the European Group on Ethics in Science and Emerging Technologies (EGE) in developing its Opinion on the Ethics of ICT.
Project Context and Objectives:
The ETICA project identified emerging Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), identified and evaluated ethical issues arising from these. By studying current governance arrangements ETICA contributed to a better understanding of the limits and effectiveness of current ethics governance. The knowledge of emerging ICTs, ethical issues they may raise and governance arrangements were used to develop general policy recommendations.
By taking an inclusive and interdisciplinary approach the project ensured that ethical issues were identified early and that recommendations will be viable, acceptable, and relevant to policy makers. The project thereby contributed to the larger aims of the Science in Society programme.
Work performed since the beginning of the project
The first challenge of the ETICA project was to identify emerging information and communication technologies. Very briefly, ETICA defines technologies as high-level socio-technical systems that have the potential to change the way humans interact with the world. Such technologies are deemed to be emerging if they are likely to be socially and economically relevant in the next 10 to 15 years, which means that they are currently being researched and developed.
By concentrating on high-level technologies, ETICA overcomes the problem of the potential infinity of technical artefacts, applications and contexts. Finally, with regards to the complex conceptual issue of ethics, morality, and research on normative questions, the project, at least in its initial stages of ethical issue determination, decided to use a descriptive and pluralistic approach, accepting as ethical issues those that are described as such by the literature and experts.
In order to identify emerging ICTs, the consortium conducted a dual discourse analysis on emerging ICTs. This discourse analysis covered two types of publications: The first discourse consisted of governmental and funding publications, which gave an insight into high level political perceptions and plans for emerging ICTs. The second discourse was constituted by publications from research institutions that work on ICT research and development. The combination of these two discourses promised a clearer understanding of current expertise and political vision, which, in combination, have a high degree of power to render their vision a reality.
Final results and their potential impact and use
An important final outcome of the ETICA project is to provide policy advice to shape future ICT-research policy in the EU as well as in the Member States and elsewhere. The above findings of the project were therefore presented to an audience of policy makers and multipliers during the project's final event on 31 March 2011 in the European Parliament. This event was co-hosted by the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment panel (STOA), underlining the strategic relevance of the topic. This section outlines the policy recommendations of the project that were presented and discussed during the event. There are two sets of recommendations, one to policy makers and one to individuals and organisations involved in ICT research and development.
Recommendations for policy makers
Policy makers have an important role in creating the regulatory framework and the infrastructure to allow ethics to be considered in ICT. If emerging ICTs are to be developed in a responsible manner that allows identifying and addressing the social and ethical problems outlined above, then a framework and infrastructure for the development of responsibility needs to be provided. Such a framework should cover at least the following three main areas of policy activity:
Provide regulatory framework which will support Ethical Impact Assessment for ICTs
- To raise awareness of the importance of ethics in new ICTs;
- To encourage ethical reflexivity within ICT research and development;
- To provide appropriate tools and methods to identify and address ethical issues;
- To address the wide range of current and new ethical issues arising from ICT, modeled along the lines of environmental, privacy or equality impact assessments;
- To allow ICT professionals to use their expertise in emerging ICTs to contribute to ethical solutions;
- To raise awareness of ethical issues regarding animals and environmental issues;
- To proactively consider legal solutions to foreseeable problems that will likely arise from the application of future and emerging technologies.
Overall, this set of recommendations addresses the institutional framework that will be required for further subjects to recognise responsibilities and develop mechanisms of discharging it. The idea of an "Ethical Impact Assessment for ICTs" was chosen because it provides precedent from areas of the environment, privacy, or equality. Such a framework is required to provide incentives to engage with issues of responsibility in innovation and emerging ICTs. It will thereby encourage discourses that will lead to the development of specific responsibility ascriptions.
Establish an ICT Ethics Observatory
- To collect and communicate the conceptual, methodological, procedural and substantive aspects of ICT ethics;
- To provide a community-owned publicly accessible repository and dissemination tool of research on ICT ethics;
- To give examples of approaches and governance structures that allow addressing ethical issues;
- To disseminate past and current research ethics and ICT including relevant work packages and deliverables and relevant National Ethics Committee opinions;
- To facilitate the Ethical Impact Assessment;
- To provide an early warning mechanism for issues that may require legislation.
While the first recommendation aimed at providing a procedural framework for identifying and addressing ethical issues in ICT, this set of recommendations aims to provide the content required for actual responsibility ascriptions. The work undertaken by the ETICA project, for example, provides important pointers towards possible ethical issues to be considered. Individuals involved in technical development are often not experts in these matters. A shared repository of ethics-related theories, practices, methodologies etc. is a necessary condition of the development of widely shared good practice.
Establish a forum for stakeholder involvement
- To allow and encourage civil society and its representations, industry, NGOs and other stakeholders to exchange ideas and express their views;
- To exchange experience between these stakeholders to develop ethical reflexivity in the discussion;
- To reach consensus concerning good practice in the area of ethics and ICT;
- To build a bridge between civil society and policy makers.
This final recommendation for policy makers points to the necessity of institutionalising important discourses that allow civil society and other stakeholders to engage on a content level with the policy as well as the technical community. Such a forum is required to ensure that responsible innovation covers not only specific technical interests and perspectives but is allowed to reflect broader societal concerns.
Recommendations for Industry and Researchers and CSOs
Industry, researchers and other individuals or organisations should adhere to the following recommendations in order to be proactive and allow innovation to be socially responsible. If the institutional framework, background, repository and societal discourses are there, then the conditions will be favorable for the incorporation of ethics and reflexivity into technical work and application usage.
Incorporate ethics into ICT research and development
- To make it explicit that ethical sensitivity is in the interest of ICT users and providers;
- To distinguish between law and ethics and see that following legal requirements is not always sufficient to address ethical issues;
- To engage in discussion of what constitutes ethical issues and be open to incorporation of gender, environmental and other issues.
The points of this recommendation aim to ensure that ethical reflexivity is realised within technical work. It furthermore aims to sensitise stakeholders to the difficulties of discharging their responsibilities.
Facilitate ethical reflexivity in ICT projects and practice
- To realise that ethical issues are context-dependent and need specific attention of individuals with local knowledge and understanding;
- To simultaneously consider the identification of ethical issues and their resolutions;
- To be open about the description of the project and its ethical issues;
- To encourage broader stakeholder engagement in the identification and resolution of ethical questions.
This final set of suggestions aims to ensure that the different stakeholders realise that ethics is not a pre-determined and fixed structure. Ethical issues are context-dependent and need to be interpreted in the particular situation. Interpretive flexibility of technology requires the participants in a technology development project to engage collectively in the initial definition of ethical issues to consider, but also to review this initial definition continuously and engage with stakeholders involved in other stages of the technology development process.
Conclusion
This report summarises the main findings and recommendations of the ETICA project. Implementing these recommendations will contribute to better and ethically more sensitive processes of technology development. By incorporating the views of all stakeholders the benefits of novel technologies will be maximised and ethical risks can be addressed early. ICT has now attained such a cross-cutting and central role in business, research and society at large that we can no longer afford to ignore its possible downsides. Following these recommendations will give the European Union the opportunity to show world-wide leadership and set positive standards based on its shared values.
Project Results:
This section is modeled on the ETICA magazine, which is available as a stand-alone document which is available from the project website (see http://www.etica-project.eu online) in electronic form or in printed form from the project coordinator.
Introduction
A look at today's newspapers will probably reveal that there has been some headline to do with the use and misuse of information and communication technology. Data may have been lost by a government, an official may have used a police database to spy on a potential girlfriend, a company may have sold data of underage users, or a file sharing provider may have been sued by an intellectual property holder. These are all ethical issues that are caused by or at least related to ICT. As ICTs spread further into the fabric of personal and social lives, as new technologies and applications get distributed in more and more activities, we can expect this type of ethical concern to increase. It is easy to guess that new types of data collected for many different purposes will create bigger concerns with regards to privacy and data protection. Intellectual property issues will continue to gain relevance in societies that are increasingly information driven.
While it thus seems safe to assume that ethical issues of ICT will remain with us for the foreseeable future, one can safely state that our current ways of addressing these are problematic. In most cases we wait until a significant problem arises. Following public outcry and political and media attempts to pin the blame, western societies start to consider how another instance of the same problem might be avoided. This is a standard way of societies to deal with problems. However, it is not always satisfactory. Would it not be better and more desirable if we could move from reaction to proactive engagement? Rather than wait until the problem is there and the solution has to be fitted to the existing technologies and social structures, would it not be better to think about them early and prevent problems?
The ETICA project started with the assumption that such a more proactive approach was both desirable and possible. It set out to identify emerging technologies that can be expected to be socially relevant in the next 10 to 15 years. These technologies were then investigated and it was asked whether one can make reasonable and transparent predictions about the ethical issues they may raise when they come into wide-spread use. On this basis, ETICA evaluated the different technologies and their likely consequences from the perspectives of law, gender, institutional ethics and technology assessment.
A final question picked up by ETICA concerns current and possible governance arrangements. The idea behind this is that simple knowledge about the future is not sufficient to ensure that appropriate actions are taken. Even if we could exactly predict which ethical issues a novel technology will raise, it is by no means clear what should be done about it. The project therefore looked at current governance arrangements that are used to identify and address ethical issues. It critically questioned the assumptions behind those arrangements with a view to coming to recommendations that will allow taking account of ethics early, guaranteeing the simultaneous determination of ethical issues in their context as well as their resolution.
This report recounts the main activities of the ETICA project. It explains the logic of the different activities and work packages and how they fit together to answer our questions. It details methodologies, approaches and their justification. It also lists the main recommendations of the project and explains how they can contribute to the overall project.
Identifying and evaluating emerging ICT ethics and ways of addressing them.
The ETICA project faced numerous challenges in achieving its aims of identifying emerging ICTs, finding out which ethical issues these were likely to raise, evaluating these issues and developing recommendations concerning suitable governance arrangements to address them. In order to allow the consortium to address them, the project was divided into three main stages: identification, evaluation, and governance.
During the identification stage, the project had to make a number of conceptual choices in order to be able to progress towards its aims. An initial one of these was what was meant by the term "emerging ICT". One problem of this definition was the concept of emergence. Typically used in systems theory and related fields, emergence normally denotes the property of an entity to arise from complex interactions of parts of the system. Emergence is therefore something that is difficult, if not impossible, to predict. In attempting to predict emerging ICTs, the ETICA project therefore faced the problem of trying to achieve the impossible.
This is a problem that all research related to the future faces. The future is not known and attempting to predict it is fraught with difficulties. However, one can at the same time observe that prediction of the future is a relatively standard activity and modern societies in many respects depend on such predictions. States have to work on predictions of future population numbers and tax revenues. Companies predict future turn-over and markets. Individually we plan our lives in the face of uncertainty. The ETICA project is located in this ambiguous area of knowledge and lack of knowledge. One important observation related to future-oriented work is that the certainty of predictions decreases with the temporal horizon of the prediction. We can safely assume that tomorrow most things will be very similar to the way they are today. At the same time we have no certainty about how things will be in 1000 years. In order to be able to make useful predictions that are not entirely trivial, ETICA therefore had to choose a suitable time frame. It chose to concentrate on technologies that are likely to emerge in the next 10 to 15 years. The reason for this choice is that it corresponds with the technology development life cycle. Technologies that are widely available and affect human lives on a greater scale in this time frame are those technologies that are currently in early stages of research and development. By looking at current research activities, one can therefore gain a reasonable understanding of likely technical futures.
This definition indicates a second major conceptual issue faced by the project, namely the definition of "information and communication technology". What do we count as technology and which types of technology should be investigated? Neither the term itself nor its current usage provides much help in arriving at a suitable definition. It quickly became clear, however, that ETICA, in order to be able to identify relevant ethical issues, would have to look at the big picture. Bits, bytes, devices and items rarely have the power to affect human lives in a way that is ethically relevant. Ethical relevance comes from substantial changes to human capabilities, freedoms, choices etc. The ETICA consortium therefore decided to use a definition of technology as high-level socio-technical systems that incorporate a view of humans and have the potential to change the way humans interact with the world. This definition meant that the activities of identifying technologies did not have to spend much effort on looking at particular aspects of present hypes, unless these indicated that there were larger changes behind them and driving them, which had the potential to fulfill our definition.
A final important point needs to be discussed, before the individual activities undertaken in the project are described in more detail in the following sections. This is the question which aims and claims are associated with the project. To put it differently: if the future remains fundamentally unknown and all the prediction a research project such as ETICA can make are fundamentally uncertain, then what is the point of the exercise? Would we not be better off investing the resources used here into the development of technology, rather than in speculation about what this development might bring about?
The answer is that such research, despite its uncertainty and lack of "scientific" exactness fulfils an important function in democratic societies. Policy makers, industry and the population as a whole need to grapple with issues related to future technologies. As pointed out in the introduction, there are increasing numbers of ethical issues related to ICT that make it into everyday headlines. Further spread of such technologies will lead to further issues. Societies need to think about how current problems should be addressed and how future issues can be taken into account before they become significant. This requires a shared understanding of what the future may hold. This shared understanding may turn out to be misleading and the resulting actions may not be able to comprehensively address all issues. Such limited knowledge is nevertheless still preferable over a passive position that simply waits until events happen and then tries to deal with the consequences.
The contributions of the ETICA project to current discourses around emerging ICTs need to be understood and interpreted in this context. The consortium is aware of the fact that it may be wrong in any of the predictions it makes. The technologies it describes may not become socially relevant, the ethical issues may not materialise or take different forms, governance recommendations may not lead to the desired results and it may well be that the most important technologies and ethical issues have been overlooked. This is a normal state of affairs for a foresight project such as ETICA. The claims to truth that the project raises are not strong or comparable with those arising from traditional scientific research. Instead, the point of the project is to give input into societal, research-oriented and policy discourses about how technologies can affect our future. The inputs to such discourses provided by ETICA claim to be well-grounded and reasonable to discuss. On this basis European societies can decide where they want to go, how they want to live together and how to regulate the use of technologies.
Future emerging information and communication technologies: characteristics of top ten
The central question that ETICA had to answer in order to successfully complete the identification stage was how to come to an understanding of the future that is relevant to policy makers. This question can be further divided into two separate sub-questions: how can we know about emerging technologies; and how we can identify the ethical issues that these technologies will raise?
Due to the multiplicity of emerging technologies and their uncertain nature, the ETICA consortium had to decide on an approach that was academically sound and simultaneously feasible within the resource constraints of the project. The principle of the identification of emerging technologies and ethical issues agreed is that it will be a distillation of published views on these issues. ETICA relies on a range of available sources to identify which technologies are likely to emerge, and which ethical issues these are likely to raise. Having settled on the principles of the bottom-up approach, the next question was what to look for in the data. The central question here was how we could make sense of the broad field of emerging and future ICTs while keeping in mind the resource constraints of the project. For the purpose of high level policy advice the most important item needed is a general understanding of which technologies are emerging. The focus of analysis therefore needs to be at a relatively high and generalisable level. Individual artefacts or applications are only of interest in so far as they can improve the understanding of general and high level technologies.
The description of the technologies consists of:
- Technology Name
- History and Definitions (from discourse analysis and other sources)
- Defining Features ("essence" of technology, how does it change the way we interact with the world)
- Application Areas / Examples
- Relation to other Technologies
- Critical Issues (ethical, social, legal and related issues as described in the discourse)
- References
Naturally we also looked at relationships between different technologies in order to understand more profoundly the semantics and nature of those technologies. After thorough clustering and categorisation of our data we have selected the following titles to present the most presumable future emerging ICTs:
- Affective computing
- Ambient intelligence
- Artificial intelligence
- Bioelectronics
- Cloud computing
- Future internet
- Human/machine symbiosis
- Neuroelectronics
- Quantum computing
- Robotics
- Virtual / Augmented Reality
We are aware that these technologies may overlap with each other and the level of these technologies may vary in many ways. For example one issue is if most of these technologies could be subordinated to Ambient Intelligence or if Bioelectronics and Neuroelectronics are pretty much under the same developmental and application area. Our decision for this selection of emerging ICTs is based on studied discourses by governments and research institutions. Therefore we also use several other methods to ensure that the list of technologies will be reasonable. These consist of a set of focus groups with technology users, a survey of technology development project leaders, and a technology assessment made by experts.
The main characteristics of future emerging information and communication technologies that came up from technology descriptions may also vary in their format while some technologies (e.g. Ambient Intelligence) have a clear vision of how it will change the way humans interact with the world but on the other hand other technologies (e.g. Quantum Computing) visions are not so much on application level but more on higher technology level. However it is already at this point possible to highlight some of those main characteristics that bring out the essence and developmental targets of these technologies. It seems that there is an ongoing strong trend towards convergence and transdisciplinarity in ICT development. ICT is already distributed throughout our everyday lives and it seems that this kind of trend is going to be even stronger in the future. Malleability, one of the characteristics of future ICT, will make it possible to think of all conceivable ways to utilise ICT in different application areas and possibly even applications we can't even think of yet. Development of nanotechnology will make hardware smaller and smaller and it is presumable that in the future so called invisible computers are reality. Of course if and when our technologically augmented environment comes a little bit more invisible and more complex there will be issues of user control and comprehension of this kind of new intelligent environment. Many technologies also vision human augmentation in one way or another. Augmented reality applications are already available for various platforms but how and with what speed development will take further steps is still hard to predict. Intelligence (including e.g. context-awareness, pervasiveness and adaptivity) is one of the main characteristics that underline developmental work of future emerging ICTs. Through intelligence there are lots of possibilities to support different kind of technologies, applications and services but there will be also many already identified threats and obstacles in utilisation of these applications. In general there is also strong emphasis at the moment towards virtualisation of services and communication. How for example civil society will accept service virtualisation and digitalisation is under vivid discussion.
Identifying ethics of emerging ICTs
The research team from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) has been responsible for identifying ethical issues arising from information and communication technologies in the coming 10 to 15 years. To this purpose 'Ethics of emerging technologies' was defined as 'aiming at the identification and articulation of ethical issues of technologies that do not exist yet but are likely to emerge.' In practice this amounted to describing what scholars in computer and information ethics say about the identified emerging ICTs from a pluralist as well as a descriptive stance that allows a number of different voices to be heard.
Building on the results of the bibliometrical analysis a traditional ethical analysis (EA) was done for each of the eleven emerging technologies discerned in the ETICA project. Each Analysis was delimitated by basing it on the defining features of the technology identified previously and independently in the Technology Descriptions. Next, relevant references were drawn from the overview of ethical academic literature constructed in phase 1. In case the references drawn from the overview of academic literature proved rather small for a specific technology, further literature was consulted from other relevant academic sources.
As was expected, not all of the analysed emerging technologies were equally well represented in literature. On the one hand for some technologies, most notably Quantum Computing and Bioelectronics, almost no relevant articles in the extant literature were found. As a result for those technologies almost no articulation of ethical issues was discovered, both in the ethical and other literature. On the other hand research showed that certain technologies received significantly more attention in literature than average. Especially Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Human-Machine Symbioses are discussed in depth in both ethical and subject related academic articles.
A remarkable finding of the research was that the amount of speculation underlying ethical issues mentioned in the analysis ranged widely. On one end of the spectrum there are issues that seem purely hypothetical. The technology implicated in some issues on Robotics and Affective Computing for instance at the moment are beyond the immediate reach of R&D and practical implementation.
On the other end of the spectrum a great deal of issues were discussed in the ethical analysis that already can be found relatively frequently in daily life and in public debates. For instance, many of the issues identified in the analysis of the Future Internet are exacerbated instances of issues encountered on the internet as we know it today.
As was anticipated in the Technology Descriptions, many of the technologies discussed are found to be closely related to each other. This can partly count as an explanation for the overlap found in issues stemming from different technologies. Especially the more generic issues such as 'privacy' and 'autonomy' came to the forefront as relevant in most of the Ethical Analyses. This does not necessarily imply that the ethical implications of the issue are similar for all of these technologies.
Furthermore research showed that to a large extent the old moral categories and concepts (say pre-internet) still apply to new technologies and are predominantly used. It should be noted however that in order to be made relevant and applicable to new technologies some of the categories and concepts need to be reconstructed and new conceptions of old concepts need to be articulated. Steps toward this re-conceptualisation were found in multiple sources that were analysed.
Evaluating the ethics of emerging ICTs
ETICA's work on "Evaluation" combined work from partners with specialised expertise to examine the key technologies identified at previous stages of the project from the perspectives of technology assessment, ethical panels, gender and legal studies. The goal was to produce a ranking of emerging technologies according to the severity of the issues they raise. The separate assessments were discussed at an expert workshop and combined into a single report with the help of an assessment grid produced at the beginning of the project. Simply stated, each partner had the task of judging the importance of the key technologies for future activities in their field of expertise.
Technology Assessment
For each of the eleven key technologies identified by ETICA, a small case study drawing on technology assessment studies and related work, served to illustrate the likelihood and urgency of expected controversies concerning ethical aspects and social impacts linked with these technologies. An important consideration is the time frame for the expected diffusion of these technologies and their practical applications. All eleven technologies raised sufficient concerns to justify ethical analysis or consideration of potential societal impact at the stage of evaluating research proposals. In the case of quantum computing and cloud computing, the outlines of practical applications are as yet indistinct and thus it seems advisable to monitor technological developments closely before deciding on the topics of ethical or social analyses.
The aim of technology assessment is to disentangle fact from fiction, in particular to separate hype from likely reality. Enthusiasm for a technology, for whatever reason, might suggest that its impact is imminent while it might still have a long way to go before it finds routine use. Too much hype can distract from a promising core of a technology as could be said to be the case for artificial intelligence which has experienced two "winters" due to its failure to meet exaggerated expectations.
Ethics of European Institutions
The ethical evaluation was carried out by Rafael Capurro and Michael Nagenborg (SHB). In a first step the "Ethics of European Institutions" were reconstructed in order to estimate the likelihood of ethical issues. One of the main indicators was a potential conflict with the values and principles of the EU Charter, the Opinions of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) as well as of other National (Bio-)Ethics Committees (NEC) and other official EU documents. The core values of European institutions highlighted in this analysis included human dignity, freedom, freedom of research, privacy, and justice. We also took into consideration the principle of proportionality, the precautionary principle and the principle of transparency as key principles. According to this framework we concluded that the following technologies have a very high likelihood of becoming an ethical issue as far as they concern or might concern human dignity, namely: Ambient Intelligence, Human-machine symbiosis, neuroelectronics, and robotics. Other technologies such as Affective Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Bioelectronics and Virtual/Augmented Reality can be seen, according to the analysis, as having a high degree of likelihood. Since the ethical analyses carried out in WP2 was based on an overview on Computer and Information Ethics it could also be demonstrated that current academic research - unlike the Ethics of European Institutions - is very much human-centred.
Gender Studies
Work on gender issues in ETICA was performed by a team from the Women's Studies Center of the University of Lodz in Poland: Prof. Elzbieta H. Oleksy (WSC's director, later replaced by Dr. Edyta Just), and the Department of Transatlantic and Media Studies of the same university: ( Dr. W. Oleksy- the coordinator of ETICA at Lodz University, and K. Zapedowska, M.A).
The team's task in ETICA (WP 3, Deliverable 3.2.4) was to assess ethical aspects of selected ICTs from the perspective of whether and to what extent gender issues are represented in the literature on the selected ICTs. A critical review of available literature (over 100 publications) was performed (methodologically based in Critical Discourse Analysis and evaluative instruments worked out for WP 3) to arrive at recommendations that would be of relevance to various stakeholders involved in ICT design, production and distribution as well as to the general public.
The main findings of the group are the following:
- Some ICTs have received little (Neuroelectronics, Quantum Computing) or minimal attention (Human-Machine Symbiosis, Robotics) in the literature gender wise so the ethical impact of their applications in the future is hard to estimate;
- Such ICTs as Affective Computing, Ambient Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Bioelectronics, Cloud Computing have been found to have the potential of positively affecting gender power relations and thus improve gender equality in the labor market across EU countries and worldwide;
- More research on the relationship between gender and ICT design, application and representation is needed so as to enhance a better understanding of ethical issues resulting from unequal participation of women and men in all aspects of ICT production and implementation;
Legal evaluation
The purpose of the evaluation was to explore the legal implications which might be relevant to the ethical aspects of emerging technologies. The evaluation was performed by researchers of the Eotvos Karoly Policy Institute, Budapest (EKINT): Iván Szekely, Beatrix Vissy and Mate D. Szabo.
The starting points of the analysis were the fundamental values as well as principles distilled from the values forming the cornerstones of Western constitutional democracies, such as human dignity, equality and the rule of law. For the purposes of the evaluation of the selected emerging technologies, both an empirical and a speculative approach were employed.
In the course of the empirical study - using the method of analysis of documents and databases - legal databases were used covering the whole corpus of EU law. As a main finding, it can be established that the legal implications of emerging technologies are not reflected in the EU legal documents and attracted only a minimal legislative attention in the competent bodies of the EU.
Conclusion of the evaluation exercise
All components of the evaluation exercise confirmed the importance of the eleven key technologies which had been identified at earlier stages of ETICA. The current exception, quantum computing, will probably not achieve maturity during ETICA's time horizon of approximately ten years. There are also doubts about the true importance of "cloud computing", which is the subject of much attention in the media and by policy makers. The concept repackages many ideas, such as shifting software from the desktop into a central "cloud", that have been in existence for some several years already. The question is whether it will break through as a pervasive approach to computing or remain restricted to certain applications or types of users. This is obviously an issue for further research.
Governance of emerging ICTs
Philippe Goujon of Faculte Notre dame de la Paix (FUNDP) led the work package and with Stephen Rainey, contributed an analysis from the viewpoint of a governance perspective which tried to determine the governance arrangements necessary to ensure ethical reflexivity efficiency in technology development project and context.
FUNDP seeks to address the issue of ethical issue determination and resolution in ethical governance approaches. The way this is approached is to rethink the relation of norms and contexts in current approaches. 'Norms' are rules for action, not true or false, but prescriptive in nature. In current approaches to ethical governance, norms are treated as separable from contexts. This results from presupposing that a norm is successfully articulated when it is issued with good intentions or that good things flow as if by logic from its articulation. However, given a norm is prescriptive; the context in which a norm is articulated is of central importance.
People in real world contexts have opinions, beliefs, and values that furnish their horizons of action. These factors, picked up from history, culture, and religion, contribute toward making up the world as it is experienced by the people - They inform their context. When a norm is articulated, in order for it to be accepted it must first be understood. If the context is ignored in the articulation of the norm, understanding cannot be presumed, so acceptance is far from guaranteed. It must be understood how it is that a norm becomes a norm in order that any given member of a social group can accept it as a norm. Central to this is an appreciation of context.
In fact, norms as they occur in current approaches do contain values, interests and so on. The problem is that ethical issues are broadly determined by experts in established approaches. The ways in which issues are determined and norms established are those that come most naturally to experts from given fields. The way experts see problems are constrained by their framings. Expertise is often quite remote from day-to-day experience, however; the issues detected (or not) by experts can fail to map onto those felt by people in general.
FUNDP, in work package 4, examines the very nature of norms. This approach is adopted in order to get to the very root of the problem of ethical reflection. In getting to the root of that problem, ethical issue determination is made possible. The alternative to a normative approach would be a descriptive approach. 'Norm' in such an approach would merely be a statistical entity - rather than referring to what people ought to do it would refer to what people actually do. This is insufficient for ethics as ethics deals with 'oughts'.
Seeing things from another's point of view is a central part of governance insofar as accountability in a democratic context relies upon the notions:
1) That no particular point of view is ruled out in principle
2) That the possibility of maximising convergence by some fair means exists.
Expertise
Between the 1980s and 2000s (between the Single European Act and the Lisbon Summit), various committees were set up to maintain supranational accountability across Europe. Latterly, these committees have been implicated in policy-shaping at all levels. In the midst of this, certain distinct models of governance have emerged. These models represent a fusion of contemporaneous academic research and professional, coal face experience. They employ sets of tools and approaches that constitute governance in the EU across the board.
Committees of experts are thought to have special insight into the topic at hand. In ethics concerning emerging technology, these experts might be technologists, sociologists, philosophers, political scientists or anyone else with a professed expertise. What they have in common is a role in tempering the process of research in order to factor in concerns that the public at large might have about the trajectory in general of technology, or the specific implications of a particular piece of technology in development. We can easily see that this inclusion is intended to keep centre-stage the perspective of those who may be affected by emerging technology: the perspective of civil society.
Using Expertise - Ethics as a Creative Component
Through attention paid to the construction of context, people can come to an informed view of an aspect of R&D. Through a dialogue approach in which the public have a say, framed in terms of ethics by experts, framings are opened both on the public and expert side. The matter of discussion is also kept to the ethical.
To include context, via the use of the significance of social actors' experiences for them we need to include it from the earliest stages of research planning. Deliverable 4.2 finds that the use of tools and institutional approaches occurs too late. It plays the role of authorisation or focus group for a decision already made. While this gulf remains between development and perspective, ethics is not a reliable possibility.
We might summarise one facet of the issue to which the above manner of engagement is addressed as follows:
Problem: Context is ignored in ethical issue determination
Issue: It is reduced to some set of presupposed factors
Expert opinion tends to import tacit assumptions and framings into ethical issue determination processes that displace the perspectives of social actors. These perspectives are accessible, through attention paid to social expression - narrative information.
Solution: Use expert opinions to set horizons for contexts, not determination of issues, based upon interpretation of narrative information.
Using this information, information that faithfully reproduces the perspectives of social actors, it will be possible to construct the norms that condition that context (and the people who inhabit it). Using detailed information on the nature of the technology R&D proposed it will be a possibility to use the knowledge of these conditions in order to hypothesise ethical issues that will arise. These issues can then feature in the R&D itself as a new part of the technical challenge.
Re-Purposing Tools - Context, Communication and Capacity
ETICA's D4.2 has developed an account of ethics in contrast with approaches that have prevailed so far. Rather than waiting for an ethical issue to emerge, this approach deals with the very nature of ethics to prevent the emergence of problems.
Ethical assessment needs to ask
- What ethical issues are there?
- For whom are they issues?
- Why do they arise as issues?
- On what basis are they determined as issues?
Overall, part of the changed mindset regarding ethics would be the notion that ethical governance tools are useful or not depending upon why, how and when they are used. Existing measures can be re-purposed as follows:
a) Ethical guidelines and Check list
A starting point for reflection, not an end in themselves
b) National Ethics Committees and Fora
Public communicative engagement, not just consultation or one-way 'education'
c) Experts and expert panels
Self-consciously bringing sectoral views to construct the context - setting horizons for reflection rather than determining issues
d) Ethics review procedure and Ethics Review Report Procedure
Discursive engagement, mutual learning, not just legal compliance
e) Follow up and audit
A well-grounded, guiding questionnaire will provide a principled basis on which to surpass the problems identified in the current ethical offering. It will raise the right questions for ethics. At the stage of ethics review procedure and for proposal writers, for example, this questionnaire will provide the capacity for ethical reflection. This capacity has been assumed up to now. A questionnaire based in the theory of norms developed in D4.2 clears the ground for a thoroughgoing ethical reflection. Unlike law, ethics cannot be enforced and so the most that can be done is to provide the material to facilitate ethics.
Recommendations
One of ETICA's research outcomes is to give recommendations particularly to policy makers on how to look at and deal with ethical issues of emerging technologies with the view that these will be thought through and incorporated early on as a technology emerges. Through its various work packages and dissemination activities which attracted input and feedback from various quarters of society, recommendations have begun to emerge as research and analysis has progressed. This section gives a synthesis of these recommendations. To provide a scientifically based approach the recommendations have mainly emerged from the different stages of the work undertaken by each work package (WP) beginning with:
- WP1 which identified emerging technologies
- WP2 which identified and analysed ethical issues of these emerging technologies
- WP3 which evaluated and ranked the ethical issues from different perspectives according to their severity and likelihood
- WP4 which continues to look at governance structures of ethical issues.
As each of the above WPs fed into each other's WPs to produce an overall picture of the research findings and eventual recommendations, the recommendations coming from the different components of the ETICA project add value to the type of recommendations that will be outlined because they ensure that different facets of ethics of emerging technologies are dealt with.
By exploring technologies, ethical issues and current ways to address these, the ETICA project has developed the following recommendations:
Recommendations for policy makers
Policy makers have an important role to create the regulatory framework and the infrastructure to allow ethics to be considered in ICT. ETICA recommends the following three main areas of policy activity:
Provide regulatory framework which will support Ethical Impact Assessment for ICTs
- To raise awareness of the importance of ethics in new ICTs;
- To encourage ethical reflexivity within ICT research and development;
- To provide appropriate tools and methods to identify and address ethical issues;
- To address the wide range of current and new ethical issues arising from ICT, modelled along the lines of environmental, privacy or equality impact assessments;
- To allow ICT professionals to use their expertise in emerging ICTs to contribute to ethical solutions;
- To raise awareness of ethical issues regarding animals and environmental issues;
- To proactively consider legal solutions to foreseeable problems that will likely arise from the application of future and emerging technologies.
Establish an ICT Ethics Observatory
- To collect and communicate the conceptual, methodological, procedural and substantive aspects of ICT ethics
- To provide a community-owned publicly accessible repository and dissemination tool of research on ICT ethics
- To give examples of approaches and governance structures that allow addressing ethical issues
- To disseminate past and current research ethics and ICT including relevant work packages and deliverables and relevant National Ethics Committee opinions
- To facilitate the Ethical Impact Assessment
- To provide an early warning mechanism for issues that may require legislation
While the first recommendation aimed at providing a procedural framework for identifying and addressing ethical issues in ICT, this set of recommendations aims to provide the content required for actual responsibility ascriptions. The work undertaken by the ETICA project, for example, provides important pointers towards possible ethical issues to be considered. Individuals involved in technical development are often not experts in these matters. A shared repository of ethics-related theories, practices, methodologies etc. is a necessary condition for the successful ascriptions of responsibilities and the related sharing of good practice.
Establish a forum for stakeholder involvement
- To allow and encourage civil society and its representations, industry, NGOs and other stakeholders to exchange ideas and express their views;
- To exchange experience between these stakeholders to develop ethical reflexivity in the discussion;
- To reach consensus concerning good practice in the area of ethics and ICT;
- To build a bridge between civil society and policy makers.
This final recommendation for policy makers points to the necessity of institutionalising important discourses that allow civil society and other stakeholders to engage on a content level with the policy as well as the technical community. Such a forum is required to ensure that responsible innovation covers not only specific technical interests and perspectives but is allowed to reflect broader societal concerns. In terms of a theory of responsibility, the forum contributes to the definition of the object of responsibility: what is it that should be achieved and what does responsibility need to be ascribed for?
Recommendations for Industry and Researchers and CSOs
Industry, researchers and other individuals or organisations should adhere to the following recommendations in order to be proactive and allow innovation to be socially responsible. If the institutional framework, background, repository and societal discourses are there, then the conditions will be favorable for the incorporation of ethics and reflexivity into technical work and application usage.
Incorporate ethics into ICT research and development
- To make it explicit that ethical sensitivity is in the interest of ICT users and providers;
- To distinguish between law and ethics and see that following legal requirements is not always sufficient to address ethical issues;
- To engage in discussion of what constitutes ethical issues and be open to incorporation of gender, environmental and other issues.
The points of this recommendation aim to ensure that specific responsibility ascriptions are realised within technical work. It furthermore aims to sensitise possible subjects of responsibility some of the difficulties of discharging their responsibilities.
Facilitate ethical reflexivity in ICT projects and practice
- To realise that ethical issues are context-dependent and need specific attention of individuals with local knowledge and understanding;
- To simultaneously consider the identification of ethical issues and their resolutions;
- To be open about the description of the project and its ethical issues;
- To encourage broader stakeholder engagement in the identification and resolution of ethical questions.
This final set of suggestions aims to ensure that the different subjects of responsibility realise that responsibility is not a pre-determined and fixed structure. Possible objects of responsibility are context-dependent and need to be interpreted in the particular situation. Interpretive flexibility of technology requires the participants in a technology development project to engage collectively in the initial definition of ethical issues to consider, but also to review this initial definition continuously and engage with stakeholders involved in other stages of the technology development process.
The ETICA project provides details, suggestions and a starting point for all of these recommendations.
ETICA - What next?
The ETICA project ended in May 2011. The development and use of ICT will not end, and neither will the ethical issues that are caused by such technologies. ETICA has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of emerging ICTs and their ethical consequences. The findings of ETICA allow researchers, industry and policy makers to develop a deeper understanding of possible and likely consequences of technology. ETICA provides a set of tools that allow those stakeholders to be proactive about such issues.
However, as stressed throughout the project, this perspective is fallible. On the one hand, there is no guarantee that the ETICA analysis has indeed identified the most important technologies. The ethical issues raised about these technologies may or may not come to pass. On the other hand, it is more than likely that novel technological developments will appear which were impossible to detect using the methodological approach of the project.
In any event, it is important to understand that ETICA provides a snapshot of what currently seem to be issues one can reasonably expect to be become relevant. Such a snapshot, by its very nature, loses currency quickly. It is therefore important to think about how the ETICA findings can be used as a basis for a sustainable way of dealing with ethics of new ICTs.
To answer this question, it is useful to distinguish between the substantive and the procedural aspects of the ethics of ICT. Substantive issues are those that directly pertain to moral views and perceptions. Those are the things that are good or bad, that are subject to debate and that are contested between stakeholders. In the ETICA project, work package 2 was dedicated to identifying those substantive issues and they were subsequently evaluated by work package 3.
Procedural issues are those that have to do with the question of which processes or procedures will allow identifying and addressing substantive issues. Those are related to more abstract questions of ethical evaluation of moral issues, but also to procedures that may allow addressing ethical issues. In the ETICA project, such questions were to a large degree covered by the question of ethical governance as investigated by work package 4.
Potential Impact:
Policy Impact
This report summarises the main findings and recommendations of the ETICA project. Implementing these recommendations will contribute to better and ethically more sensitive processes of technology development. By incorporating the views of all stakeholders the benefits of novel technologies will be maximised and ethical risks can be addressed early. ICT has now attained such a cross-cutting and central role in business, research and society at large that we can no longer afford to ignore its possible downsides. Following these recommendations will give the European Union the opportunity to show world-wide leadership and set positive standards based on its shared values.
ETICA has made significant inroads in disseminating these findings and influencing policy and practice in ICT ethics, in particular on the European level. Noteworthy examples of this include:
- ETICA / STOA Parliament event
The final event of the ETICA project was co-hosted by the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessments Panel. The event was held in the European Parliament on 31.03.2011. It attracted a number of high-ranking decision makers from policy, research and industry. Among the speakers contributing to the event was the Director of the European Research Area, the CEO of the European Science Foundation and the European Data Protection Supervisor. Industry was represented by numerous companies, including Google and IBM.
- The European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) Opinion on the ethical issues of ICT
The EGE is an advisory body reporting directly to the President of the European Commission. It has been tasked by the President to publish an Opinion on ethical issues of ICT. ETICA coordinator Prof B. Stahl and WP4 leader Prof P. Goujon were among the first external experts to present their views to the EGE in preparation of this Opinion. Their presentations were based on the findings and recommendations of the ETICA project. This Opinion is going to influence policy beyond the FP7 research area. The EGE's website states that "the Opinion may offer a reference point to the Commission to promote a responsible use of the Digital Agenda for Europe and facilitate the societal acceptance of such an important policy item. The Opinion should take into consideration different possible applications of ICT, such as widespread take-up and use by citizens of the internet?-health and use of ICT in environmental and agricultural domains."
- EU training event
ETICA in collaboration with EGAIS prepared and held a two day training event for ethics experts and project officers. This took place in Brussels in April 2011 and allowed interaction with these individuals who are key to practice with regards to ethics and ICT.
- EU Recommendations on responsible innovation to Member States
The EU DG RTD, Directorate B (European Research Area) is preparing a recommendation for Member States on the topic of "responsible innovation". ETICA coordinator, B. Stahl, was invited as a participant in the first preparatory workshop in May 2011 which was aimed at developing the principles of responsible innovations and ways to achieve it.
Final EU ETICA Event
ETICA co-hosted its final event on 31 March 2011 with the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel (STOA). This event was held at the European Parliament in Brussels. Event proceedings can be viewed by visiting the ETICA website at http://www.etica-project.eu and clicking on EU EVENT VIDEO LINK
EU training event
The EU Training which was a collaboration between the ETICA and EGAIS projects took place in Brussels on 26th and 27th April 2011.
Two ETICA International Conferences
ETICA had scheduled two international conferences during its project span. The first was held in 2010 and the second in 2011.
Two Policy Briefing Sessions
ETICA had lined up two policy briefing sessions during the project's duration. The first was held in Torino, Italy and the second in Brussels, Belgium. Below is a brief of both:
ETICA was invited to present its project at the ESOF event which was held in Torino, Italy from the 2nd to the 7th of July 2010. ESOF2010 was an open laboratory to experiment scientific, technological, and multimedia innovation and a window on the world of the young and the most creative. All of ETICA's full presentations were captured on video and can be accessed from: (see http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ESOF+ETICA&aq=f online).
The second policy briefing session of the ETICA project was implemented as an aspect of the ETICA final event on 31 March 2011. The event was co-hosted by ETICA and the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment panel (STOA). Event details can be viewed via video link by visiting the ETICA website and clinking on the EU EVENT VIDEO LINK
Summer School
The summer school was held in collaboration with IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) WGs 9.2 9.6./11.7 11.4 11.6 and the EU FP7 PrimeLife project. It took place in Helsingborg, Sweden, from the 2nd to the 6th of August 2010. The topic covered was Emerging Information and Communication Technologies and resulting ethical, privacy and identity issues which was part of the PrimeLife/IFIP theme on Privacy and Identity Management for Life. To explore these issues, ETICA invited Master's and/or PhD students from different disciplines whose work looks at future and emerging technologies including ethics, privacy and identity management to submit paper for consideration at the Summer School.
Collaboration with other projects
Follow-up work
There are several activities that follow from ETICA activities and that have been accepted or are ongoing at the time of writing of this second periodic report. The list below gives a brief overview of those projects and activities.
Address of the Project Public Website and Relevant Contact Details
The project website will remain available under the URL http://www.etica-project.eu It has been migrated from its current location to a new website, which is hosted on a server of the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility.
The new website will contain all static aspects of the ETICA project, including deliverables, publications etc. The dynamic aspect, namely the descriptions of technologies, ethics, and evaluation as well as governance and recommendations have been moved into a wiki. This is a first step towards the implementation of the ETICA recommendation of providing an ICT ethics observatory. The form of a wiki was chosen because it allows general access to the content and therefore fulfils the criterion of the observatory to be community owned.
Project website: http://www.etica-project.eu
The ETICA project identified ethical issues of emerging ICT applications. The project highlighted 11 technologies which are: Affective computing, Ambient intelligence, Artificial intelligence, Bioelectronics, Cloud computing, Future internet, Human/machine symbiosis, Neuroelectronics, Quantum computing, Robotics and Virtual / Augmented Reality. It also described ethical issues related to these technologies. Furthermore, the project described the methodology used to arrive at these findings. On the basis of the identified technologies and their ethical aspects, the ETICA project evaluated and ranked them. It investigated current and possible ways of implementing governance that are conducive to addressing the ethics of emerging ICTs.
The project put forward recommendations which specifically address policy makers as formulators of regulatory frameworks who ought to consider ethics in ICTs, particularly as they emerge. Another set of recommendations were developed for industry, researchers and civil society organisations (CSOs) who are innovators and users and therefore who ought to be proactive in their consideration of ethics and ICTs.
ETICA has significant impact, both academically and in terms of policy development. The project has essentially contributed to how ethics of emerging technologies may be identified and in the process aid in technology development especially at European level. This has been particularly through wider stakeholder engagement and consultation as seen from the collaborative ETICA/STOA Parliamentary Event in Brussels as well as through the EU training event with personnel closely linked to ethics and ICTs. ETICA findings will support the European Group on Ethics in Science and Emerging Technologies (EGE) in developing its Opinion on the Ethics of ICT.
Project Context and Objectives:
The ETICA project identified emerging Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), identified and evaluated ethical issues arising from these. By studying current governance arrangements ETICA contributed to a better understanding of the limits and effectiveness of current ethics governance. The knowledge of emerging ICTs, ethical issues they may raise and governance arrangements were used to develop general policy recommendations.
By taking an inclusive and interdisciplinary approach the project ensured that ethical issues were identified early and that recommendations will be viable, acceptable, and relevant to policy makers. The project thereby contributed to the larger aims of the Science in Society programme.
Work performed since the beginning of the project
The first challenge of the ETICA project was to identify emerging information and communication technologies. Very briefly, ETICA defines technologies as high-level socio-technical systems that have the potential to change the way humans interact with the world. Such technologies are deemed to be emerging if they are likely to be socially and economically relevant in the next 10 to 15 years, which means that they are currently being researched and developed.
By concentrating on high-level technologies, ETICA overcomes the problem of the potential infinity of technical artefacts, applications and contexts. Finally, with regards to the complex conceptual issue of ethics, morality, and research on normative questions, the project, at least in its initial stages of ethical issue determination, decided to use a descriptive and pluralistic approach, accepting as ethical issues those that are described as such by the literature and experts.
In order to identify emerging ICTs, the consortium conducted a dual discourse analysis on emerging ICTs. This discourse analysis covered two types of publications: The first discourse consisted of governmental and funding publications, which gave an insight into high level political perceptions and plans for emerging ICTs. The second discourse was constituted by publications from research institutions that work on ICT research and development. The combination of these two discourses promised a clearer understanding of current expertise and political vision, which, in combination, have a high degree of power to render their vision a reality.
Final results and their potential impact and use
An important final outcome of the ETICA project is to provide policy advice to shape future ICT-research policy in the EU as well as in the Member States and elsewhere. The above findings of the project were therefore presented to an audience of policy makers and multipliers during the project's final event on 31 March 2011 in the European Parliament. This event was co-hosted by the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment panel (STOA), underlining the strategic relevance of the topic. This section outlines the policy recommendations of the project that were presented and discussed during the event. There are two sets of recommendations, one to policy makers and one to individuals and organisations involved in ICT research and development.
Recommendations for policy makers
Policy makers have an important role in creating the regulatory framework and the infrastructure to allow ethics to be considered in ICT. If emerging ICTs are to be developed in a responsible manner that allows identifying and addressing the social and ethical problems outlined above, then a framework and infrastructure for the development of responsibility needs to be provided. Such a framework should cover at least the following three main areas of policy activity:
Provide regulatory framework which will support Ethical Impact Assessment for ICTs
- To raise awareness of the importance of ethics in new ICTs;
- To encourage ethical reflexivity within ICT research and development;
- To provide appropriate tools and methods to identify and address ethical issues;
- To address the wide range of current and new ethical issues arising from ICT, modeled along the lines of environmental, privacy or equality impact assessments;
- To allow ICT professionals to use their expertise in emerging ICTs to contribute to ethical solutions;
- To raise awareness of ethical issues regarding animals and environmental issues;
- To proactively consider legal solutions to foreseeable problems that will likely arise from the application of future and emerging technologies.
Overall, this set of recommendations addresses the institutional framework that will be required for further subjects to recognise responsibilities and develop mechanisms of discharging it. The idea of an "Ethical Impact Assessment for ICTs" was chosen because it provides precedent from areas of the environment, privacy, or equality. Such a framework is required to provide incentives to engage with issues of responsibility in innovation and emerging ICTs. It will thereby encourage discourses that will lead to the development of specific responsibility ascriptions.
Establish an ICT Ethics Observatory
- To collect and communicate the conceptual, methodological, procedural and substantive aspects of ICT ethics;
- To provide a community-owned publicly accessible repository and dissemination tool of research on ICT ethics;
- To give examples of approaches and governance structures that allow addressing ethical issues;
- To disseminate past and current research ethics and ICT including relevant work packages and deliverables and relevant National Ethics Committee opinions;
- To facilitate the Ethical Impact Assessment;
- To provide an early warning mechanism for issues that may require legislation.
While the first recommendation aimed at providing a procedural framework for identifying and addressing ethical issues in ICT, this set of recommendations aims to provide the content required for actual responsibility ascriptions. The work undertaken by the ETICA project, for example, provides important pointers towards possible ethical issues to be considered. Individuals involved in technical development are often not experts in these matters. A shared repository of ethics-related theories, practices, methodologies etc. is a necessary condition of the development of widely shared good practice.
Establish a forum for stakeholder involvement
- To allow and encourage civil society and its representations, industry, NGOs and other stakeholders to exchange ideas and express their views;
- To exchange experience between these stakeholders to develop ethical reflexivity in the discussion;
- To reach consensus concerning good practice in the area of ethics and ICT;
- To build a bridge between civil society and policy makers.
This final recommendation for policy makers points to the necessity of institutionalising important discourses that allow civil society and other stakeholders to engage on a content level with the policy as well as the technical community. Such a forum is required to ensure that responsible innovation covers not only specific technical interests and perspectives but is allowed to reflect broader societal concerns.
Recommendations for Industry and Researchers and CSOs
Industry, researchers and other individuals or organisations should adhere to the following recommendations in order to be proactive and allow innovation to be socially responsible. If the institutional framework, background, repository and societal discourses are there, then the conditions will be favorable for the incorporation of ethics and reflexivity into technical work and application usage.
Incorporate ethics into ICT research and development
- To make it explicit that ethical sensitivity is in the interest of ICT users and providers;
- To distinguish between law and ethics and see that following legal requirements is not always sufficient to address ethical issues;
- To engage in discussion of what constitutes ethical issues and be open to incorporation of gender, environmental and other issues.
The points of this recommendation aim to ensure that ethical reflexivity is realised within technical work. It furthermore aims to sensitise stakeholders to the difficulties of discharging their responsibilities.
Facilitate ethical reflexivity in ICT projects and practice
- To realise that ethical issues are context-dependent and need specific attention of individuals with local knowledge and understanding;
- To simultaneously consider the identification of ethical issues and their resolutions;
- To be open about the description of the project and its ethical issues;
- To encourage broader stakeholder engagement in the identification and resolution of ethical questions.
This final set of suggestions aims to ensure that the different stakeholders realise that ethics is not a pre-determined and fixed structure. Ethical issues are context-dependent and need to be interpreted in the particular situation. Interpretive flexibility of technology requires the participants in a technology development project to engage collectively in the initial definition of ethical issues to consider, but also to review this initial definition continuously and engage with stakeholders involved in other stages of the technology development process.
Conclusion
This report summarises the main findings and recommendations of the ETICA project. Implementing these recommendations will contribute to better and ethically more sensitive processes of technology development. By incorporating the views of all stakeholders the benefits of novel technologies will be maximised and ethical risks can be addressed early. ICT has now attained such a cross-cutting and central role in business, research and society at large that we can no longer afford to ignore its possible downsides. Following these recommendations will give the European Union the opportunity to show world-wide leadership and set positive standards based on its shared values.
Project Results:
This section is modeled on the ETICA magazine, which is available as a stand-alone document which is available from the project website (see http://www.etica-project.eu online) in electronic form or in printed form from the project coordinator.
Introduction
A look at today's newspapers will probably reveal that there has been some headline to do with the use and misuse of information and communication technology. Data may have been lost by a government, an official may have used a police database to spy on a potential girlfriend, a company may have sold data of underage users, or a file sharing provider may have been sued by an intellectual property holder. These are all ethical issues that are caused by or at least related to ICT. As ICTs spread further into the fabric of personal and social lives, as new technologies and applications get distributed in more and more activities, we can expect this type of ethical concern to increase. It is easy to guess that new types of data collected for many different purposes will create bigger concerns with regards to privacy and data protection. Intellectual property issues will continue to gain relevance in societies that are increasingly information driven.
While it thus seems safe to assume that ethical issues of ICT will remain with us for the foreseeable future, one can safely state that our current ways of addressing these are problematic. In most cases we wait until a significant problem arises. Following public outcry and political and media attempts to pin the blame, western societies start to consider how another instance of the same problem might be avoided. This is a standard way of societies to deal with problems. However, it is not always satisfactory. Would it not be better and more desirable if we could move from reaction to proactive engagement? Rather than wait until the problem is there and the solution has to be fitted to the existing technologies and social structures, would it not be better to think about them early and prevent problems?
The ETICA project started with the assumption that such a more proactive approach was both desirable and possible. It set out to identify emerging technologies that can be expected to be socially relevant in the next 10 to 15 years. These technologies were then investigated and it was asked whether one can make reasonable and transparent predictions about the ethical issues they may raise when they come into wide-spread use. On this basis, ETICA evaluated the different technologies and their likely consequences from the perspectives of law, gender, institutional ethics and technology assessment.
A final question picked up by ETICA concerns current and possible governance arrangements. The idea behind this is that simple knowledge about the future is not sufficient to ensure that appropriate actions are taken. Even if we could exactly predict which ethical issues a novel technology will raise, it is by no means clear what should be done about it. The project therefore looked at current governance arrangements that are used to identify and address ethical issues. It critically questioned the assumptions behind those arrangements with a view to coming to recommendations that will allow taking account of ethics early, guaranteeing the simultaneous determination of ethical issues in their context as well as their resolution.
This report recounts the main activities of the ETICA project. It explains the logic of the different activities and work packages and how they fit together to answer our questions. It details methodologies, approaches and their justification. It also lists the main recommendations of the project and explains how they can contribute to the overall project.
Identifying and evaluating emerging ICT ethics and ways of addressing them.
The ETICA project faced numerous challenges in achieving its aims of identifying emerging ICTs, finding out which ethical issues these were likely to raise, evaluating these issues and developing recommendations concerning suitable governance arrangements to address them. In order to allow the consortium to address them, the project was divided into three main stages: identification, evaluation, and governance.
During the identification stage, the project had to make a number of conceptual choices in order to be able to progress towards its aims. An initial one of these was what was meant by the term "emerging ICT". One problem of this definition was the concept of emergence. Typically used in systems theory and related fields, emergence normally denotes the property of an entity to arise from complex interactions of parts of the system. Emergence is therefore something that is difficult, if not impossible, to predict. In attempting to predict emerging ICTs, the ETICA project therefore faced the problem of trying to achieve the impossible.
This is a problem that all research related to the future faces. The future is not known and attempting to predict it is fraught with difficulties. However, one can at the same time observe that prediction of the future is a relatively standard activity and modern societies in many respects depend on such predictions. States have to work on predictions of future population numbers and tax revenues. Companies predict future turn-over and markets. Individually we plan our lives in the face of uncertainty. The ETICA project is located in this ambiguous area of knowledge and lack of knowledge. One important observation related to future-oriented work is that the certainty of predictions decreases with the temporal horizon of the prediction. We can safely assume that tomorrow most things will be very similar to the way they are today. At the same time we have no certainty about how things will be in 1000 years. In order to be able to make useful predictions that are not entirely trivial, ETICA therefore had to choose a suitable time frame. It chose to concentrate on technologies that are likely to emerge in the next 10 to 15 years. The reason for this choice is that it corresponds with the technology development life cycle. Technologies that are widely available and affect human lives on a greater scale in this time frame are those technologies that are currently in early stages of research and development. By looking at current research activities, one can therefore gain a reasonable understanding of likely technical futures.
This definition indicates a second major conceptual issue faced by the project, namely the definition of "information and communication technology". What do we count as technology and which types of technology should be investigated? Neither the term itself nor its current usage provides much help in arriving at a suitable definition. It quickly became clear, however, that ETICA, in order to be able to identify relevant ethical issues, would have to look at the big picture. Bits, bytes, devices and items rarely have the power to affect human lives in a way that is ethically relevant. Ethical relevance comes from substantial changes to human capabilities, freedoms, choices etc. The ETICA consortium therefore decided to use a definition of technology as high-level socio-technical systems that incorporate a view of humans and have the potential to change the way humans interact with the world. This definition meant that the activities of identifying technologies did not have to spend much effort on looking at particular aspects of present hypes, unless these indicated that there were larger changes behind them and driving them, which had the potential to fulfill our definition.
A final important point needs to be discussed, before the individual activities undertaken in the project are described in more detail in the following sections. This is the question which aims and claims are associated with the project. To put it differently: if the future remains fundamentally unknown and all the prediction a research project such as ETICA can make are fundamentally uncertain, then what is the point of the exercise? Would we not be better off investing the resources used here into the development of technology, rather than in speculation about what this development might bring about?
The answer is that such research, despite its uncertainty and lack of "scientific" exactness fulfils an important function in democratic societies. Policy makers, industry and the population as a whole need to grapple with issues related to future technologies. As pointed out in the introduction, there are increasing numbers of ethical issues related to ICT that make it into everyday headlines. Further spread of such technologies will lead to further issues. Societies need to think about how current problems should be addressed and how future issues can be taken into account before they become significant. This requires a shared understanding of what the future may hold. This shared understanding may turn out to be misleading and the resulting actions may not be able to comprehensively address all issues. Such limited knowledge is nevertheless still preferable over a passive position that simply waits until events happen and then tries to deal with the consequences.
The contributions of the ETICA project to current discourses around emerging ICTs need to be understood and interpreted in this context. The consortium is aware of the fact that it may be wrong in any of the predictions it makes. The technologies it describes may not become socially relevant, the ethical issues may not materialise or take different forms, governance recommendations may not lead to the desired results and it may well be that the most important technologies and ethical issues have been overlooked. This is a normal state of affairs for a foresight project such as ETICA. The claims to truth that the project raises are not strong or comparable with those arising from traditional scientific research. Instead, the point of the project is to give input into societal, research-oriented and policy discourses about how technologies can affect our future. The inputs to such discourses provided by ETICA claim to be well-grounded and reasonable to discuss. On this basis European societies can decide where they want to go, how they want to live together and how to regulate the use of technologies.
Future emerging information and communication technologies: characteristics of top ten
The central question that ETICA had to answer in order to successfully complete the identification stage was how to come to an understanding of the future that is relevant to policy makers. This question can be further divided into two separate sub-questions: how can we know about emerging technologies; and how we can identify the ethical issues that these technologies will raise?
Due to the multiplicity of emerging technologies and their uncertain nature, the ETICA consortium had to decide on an approach that was academically sound and simultaneously feasible within the resource constraints of the project. The principle of the identification of emerging technologies and ethical issues agreed is that it will be a distillation of published views on these issues. ETICA relies on a range of available sources to identify which technologies are likely to emerge, and which ethical issues these are likely to raise. Having settled on the principles of the bottom-up approach, the next question was what to look for in the data. The central question here was how we could make sense of the broad field of emerging and future ICTs while keeping in mind the resource constraints of the project. For the purpose of high level policy advice the most important item needed is a general understanding of which technologies are emerging. The focus of analysis therefore needs to be at a relatively high and generalisable level. Individual artefacts or applications are only of interest in so far as they can improve the understanding of general and high level technologies.
The description of the technologies consists of:
- Technology Name
- History and Definitions (from discourse analysis and other sources)
- Defining Features ("essence" of technology, how does it change the way we interact with the world)
- Application Areas / Examples
- Relation to other Technologies
- Critical Issues (ethical, social, legal and related issues as described in the discourse)
- References
Naturally we also looked at relationships between different technologies in order to understand more profoundly the semantics and nature of those technologies. After thorough clustering and categorisation of our data we have selected the following titles to present the most presumable future emerging ICTs:
- Affective computing
- Ambient intelligence
- Artificial intelligence
- Bioelectronics
- Cloud computing
- Future internet
- Human/machine symbiosis
- Neuroelectronics
- Quantum computing
- Robotics
- Virtual / Augmented Reality
We are aware that these technologies may overlap with each other and the level of these technologies may vary in many ways. For example one issue is if most of these technologies could be subordinated to Ambient Intelligence or if Bioelectronics and Neuroelectronics are pretty much under the same developmental and application area. Our decision for this selection of emerging ICTs is based on studied discourses by governments and research institutions. Therefore we also use several other methods to ensure that the list of technologies will be reasonable. These consist of a set of focus groups with technology users, a survey of technology development project leaders, and a technology assessment made by experts.
The main characteristics of future emerging information and communication technologies that came up from technology descriptions may also vary in their format while some technologies (e.g. Ambient Intelligence) have a clear vision of how it will change the way humans interact with the world but on the other hand other technologies (e.g. Quantum Computing) visions are not so much on application level but more on higher technology level. However it is already at this point possible to highlight some of those main characteristics that bring out the essence and developmental targets of these technologies. It seems that there is an ongoing strong trend towards convergence and transdisciplinarity in ICT development. ICT is already distributed throughout our everyday lives and it seems that this kind of trend is going to be even stronger in the future. Malleability, one of the characteristics of future ICT, will make it possible to think of all conceivable ways to utilise ICT in different application areas and possibly even applications we can't even think of yet. Development of nanotechnology will make hardware smaller and smaller and it is presumable that in the future so called invisible computers are reality. Of course if and when our technologically augmented environment comes a little bit more invisible and more complex there will be issues of user control and comprehension of this kind of new intelligent environment. Many technologies also vision human augmentation in one way or another. Augmented reality applications are already available for various platforms but how and with what speed development will take further steps is still hard to predict. Intelligence (including e.g. context-awareness, pervasiveness and adaptivity) is one of the main characteristics that underline developmental work of future emerging ICTs. Through intelligence there are lots of possibilities to support different kind of technologies, applications and services but there will be also many already identified threats and obstacles in utilisation of these applications. In general there is also strong emphasis at the moment towards virtualisation of services and communication. How for example civil society will accept service virtualisation and digitalisation is under vivid discussion.
Identifying ethics of emerging ICTs
The research team from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) has been responsible for identifying ethical issues arising from information and communication technologies in the coming 10 to 15 years. To this purpose 'Ethics of emerging technologies' was defined as 'aiming at the identification and articulation of ethical issues of technologies that do not exist yet but are likely to emerge.' In practice this amounted to describing what scholars in computer and information ethics say about the identified emerging ICTs from a pluralist as well as a descriptive stance that allows a number of different voices to be heard.
Building on the results of the bibliometrical analysis a traditional ethical analysis (EA) was done for each of the eleven emerging technologies discerned in the ETICA project. Each Analysis was delimitated by basing it on the defining features of the technology identified previously and independently in the Technology Descriptions. Next, relevant references were drawn from the overview of ethical academic literature constructed in phase 1. In case the references drawn from the overview of academic literature proved rather small for a specific technology, further literature was consulted from other relevant academic sources.
As was expected, not all of the analysed emerging technologies were equally well represented in literature. On the one hand for some technologies, most notably Quantum Computing and Bioelectronics, almost no relevant articles in the extant literature were found. As a result for those technologies almost no articulation of ethical issues was discovered, both in the ethical and other literature. On the other hand research showed that certain technologies received significantly more attention in literature than average. Especially Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Human-Machine Symbioses are discussed in depth in both ethical and subject related academic articles.
A remarkable finding of the research was that the amount of speculation underlying ethical issues mentioned in the analysis ranged widely. On one end of the spectrum there are issues that seem purely hypothetical. The technology implicated in some issues on Robotics and Affective Computing for instance at the moment are beyond the immediate reach of R&D and practical implementation.
On the other end of the spectrum a great deal of issues were discussed in the ethical analysis that already can be found relatively frequently in daily life and in public debates. For instance, many of the issues identified in the analysis of the Future Internet are exacerbated instances of issues encountered on the internet as we know it today.
As was anticipated in the Technology Descriptions, many of the technologies discussed are found to be closely related to each other. This can partly count as an explanation for the overlap found in issues stemming from different technologies. Especially the more generic issues such as 'privacy' and 'autonomy' came to the forefront as relevant in most of the Ethical Analyses. This does not necessarily imply that the ethical implications of the issue are similar for all of these technologies.
Furthermore research showed that to a large extent the old moral categories and concepts (say pre-internet) still apply to new technologies and are predominantly used. It should be noted however that in order to be made relevant and applicable to new technologies some of the categories and concepts need to be reconstructed and new conceptions of old concepts need to be articulated. Steps toward this re-conceptualisation were found in multiple sources that were analysed.
Evaluating the ethics of emerging ICTs
ETICA's work on "Evaluation" combined work from partners with specialised expertise to examine the key technologies identified at previous stages of the project from the perspectives of technology assessment, ethical panels, gender and legal studies. The goal was to produce a ranking of emerging technologies according to the severity of the issues they raise. The separate assessments were discussed at an expert workshop and combined into a single report with the help of an assessment grid produced at the beginning of the project. Simply stated, each partner had the task of judging the importance of the key technologies for future activities in their field of expertise.
Technology Assessment
For each of the eleven key technologies identified by ETICA, a small case study drawing on technology assessment studies and related work, served to illustrate the likelihood and urgency of expected controversies concerning ethical aspects and social impacts linked with these technologies. An important consideration is the time frame for the expected diffusion of these technologies and their practical applications. All eleven technologies raised sufficient concerns to justify ethical analysis or consideration of potential societal impact at the stage of evaluating research proposals. In the case of quantum computing and cloud computing, the outlines of practical applications are as yet indistinct and thus it seems advisable to monitor technological developments closely before deciding on the topics of ethical or social analyses.
The aim of technology assessment is to disentangle fact from fiction, in particular to separate hype from likely reality. Enthusiasm for a technology, for whatever reason, might suggest that its impact is imminent while it might still have a long way to go before it finds routine use. Too much hype can distract from a promising core of a technology as could be said to be the case for artificial intelligence which has experienced two "winters" due to its failure to meet exaggerated expectations.
Ethics of European Institutions
The ethical evaluation was carried out by Rafael Capurro and Michael Nagenborg (SHB). In a first step the "Ethics of European Institutions" were reconstructed in order to estimate the likelihood of ethical issues. One of the main indicators was a potential conflict with the values and principles of the EU Charter, the Opinions of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) as well as of other National (Bio-)Ethics Committees (NEC) and other official EU documents. The core values of European institutions highlighted in this analysis included human dignity, freedom, freedom of research, privacy, and justice. We also took into consideration the principle of proportionality, the precautionary principle and the principle of transparency as key principles. According to this framework we concluded that the following technologies have a very high likelihood of becoming an ethical issue as far as they concern or might concern human dignity, namely: Ambient Intelligence, Human-machine symbiosis, neuroelectronics, and robotics. Other technologies such as Affective Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Bioelectronics and Virtual/Augmented Reality can be seen, according to the analysis, as having a high degree of likelihood. Since the ethical analyses carried out in WP2 was based on an overview on Computer and Information Ethics it could also be demonstrated that current academic research - unlike the Ethics of European Institutions - is very much human-centred.
Gender Studies
Work on gender issues in ETICA was performed by a team from the Women's Studies Center of the University of Lodz in Poland: Prof. Elzbieta H. Oleksy (WSC's director, later replaced by Dr. Edyta Just), and the Department of Transatlantic and Media Studies of the same university: ( Dr. W. Oleksy- the coordinator of ETICA at Lodz University, and K. Zapedowska, M.A).
The team's task in ETICA (WP 3, Deliverable 3.2.4) was to assess ethical aspects of selected ICTs from the perspective of whether and to what extent gender issues are represented in the literature on the selected ICTs. A critical review of available literature (over 100 publications) was performed (methodologically based in Critical Discourse Analysis and evaluative instruments worked out for WP 3) to arrive at recommendations that would be of relevance to various stakeholders involved in ICT design, production and distribution as well as to the general public.
The main findings of the group are the following:
- Some ICTs have received little (Neuroelectronics, Quantum Computing) or minimal attention (Human-Machine Symbiosis, Robotics) in the literature gender wise so the ethical impact of their applications in the future is hard to estimate;
- Such ICTs as Affective Computing, Ambient Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Bioelectronics, Cloud Computing have been found to have the potential of positively affecting gender power relations and thus improve gender equality in the labor market across EU countries and worldwide;
- More research on the relationship between gender and ICT design, application and representation is needed so as to enhance a better understanding of ethical issues resulting from unequal participation of women and men in all aspects of ICT production and implementation;
Legal evaluation
The purpose of the evaluation was to explore the legal implications which might be relevant to the ethical aspects of emerging technologies. The evaluation was performed by researchers of the Eotvos Karoly Policy Institute, Budapest (EKINT): Iván Szekely, Beatrix Vissy and Mate D. Szabo.
The starting points of the analysis were the fundamental values as well as principles distilled from the values forming the cornerstones of Western constitutional democracies, such as human dignity, equality and the rule of law. For the purposes of the evaluation of the selected emerging technologies, both an empirical and a speculative approach were employed.
In the course of the empirical study - using the method of analysis of documents and databases - legal databases were used covering the whole corpus of EU law. As a main finding, it can be established that the legal implications of emerging technologies are not reflected in the EU legal documents and attracted only a minimal legislative attention in the competent bodies of the EU.
Conclusion of the evaluation exercise
All components of the evaluation exercise confirmed the importance of the eleven key technologies which had been identified at earlier stages of ETICA. The current exception, quantum computing, will probably not achieve maturity during ETICA's time horizon of approximately ten years. There are also doubts about the true importance of "cloud computing", which is the subject of much attention in the media and by policy makers. The concept repackages many ideas, such as shifting software from the desktop into a central "cloud", that have been in existence for some several years already. The question is whether it will break through as a pervasive approach to computing or remain restricted to certain applications or types of users. This is obviously an issue for further research.
Governance of emerging ICTs
Philippe Goujon of Faculte Notre dame de la Paix (FUNDP) led the work package and with Stephen Rainey, contributed an analysis from the viewpoint of a governance perspective which tried to determine the governance arrangements necessary to ensure ethical reflexivity efficiency in technology development project and context.
FUNDP seeks to address the issue of ethical issue determination and resolution in ethical governance approaches. The way this is approached is to rethink the relation of norms and contexts in current approaches. 'Norms' are rules for action, not true or false, but prescriptive in nature. In current approaches to ethical governance, norms are treated as separable from contexts. This results from presupposing that a norm is successfully articulated when it is issued with good intentions or that good things flow as if by logic from its articulation. However, given a norm is prescriptive; the context in which a norm is articulated is of central importance.
People in real world contexts have opinions, beliefs, and values that furnish their horizons of action. These factors, picked up from history, culture, and religion, contribute toward making up the world as it is experienced by the people - They inform their context. When a norm is articulated, in order for it to be accepted it must first be understood. If the context is ignored in the articulation of the norm, understanding cannot be presumed, so acceptance is far from guaranteed. It must be understood how it is that a norm becomes a norm in order that any given member of a social group can accept it as a norm. Central to this is an appreciation of context.
In fact, norms as they occur in current approaches do contain values, interests and so on. The problem is that ethical issues are broadly determined by experts in established approaches. The ways in which issues are determined and norms established are those that come most naturally to experts from given fields. The way experts see problems are constrained by their framings. Expertise is often quite remote from day-to-day experience, however; the issues detected (or not) by experts can fail to map onto those felt by people in general.
FUNDP, in work package 4, examines the very nature of norms. This approach is adopted in order to get to the very root of the problem of ethical reflection. In getting to the root of that problem, ethical issue determination is made possible. The alternative to a normative approach would be a descriptive approach. 'Norm' in such an approach would merely be a statistical entity - rather than referring to what people ought to do it would refer to what people actually do. This is insufficient for ethics as ethics deals with 'oughts'.
Seeing things from another's point of view is a central part of governance insofar as accountability in a democratic context relies upon the notions:
1) That no particular point of view is ruled out in principle
2) That the possibility of maximising convergence by some fair means exists.
Expertise
Between the 1980s and 2000s (between the Single European Act and the Lisbon Summit), various committees were set up to maintain supranational accountability across Europe. Latterly, these committees have been implicated in policy-shaping at all levels. In the midst of this, certain distinct models of governance have emerged. These models represent a fusion of contemporaneous academic research and professional, coal face experience. They employ sets of tools and approaches that constitute governance in the EU across the board.
Committees of experts are thought to have special insight into the topic at hand. In ethics concerning emerging technology, these experts might be technologists, sociologists, philosophers, political scientists or anyone else with a professed expertise. What they have in common is a role in tempering the process of research in order to factor in concerns that the public at large might have about the trajectory in general of technology, or the specific implications of a particular piece of technology in development. We can easily see that this inclusion is intended to keep centre-stage the perspective of those who may be affected by emerging technology: the perspective of civil society.
Using Expertise - Ethics as a Creative Component
Through attention paid to the construction of context, people can come to an informed view of an aspect of R&D. Through a dialogue approach in which the public have a say, framed in terms of ethics by experts, framings are opened both on the public and expert side. The matter of discussion is also kept to the ethical.
To include context, via the use of the significance of social actors' experiences for them we need to include it from the earliest stages of research planning. Deliverable 4.2 finds that the use of tools and institutional approaches occurs too late. It plays the role of authorisation or focus group for a decision already made. While this gulf remains between development and perspective, ethics is not a reliable possibility.
We might summarise one facet of the issue to which the above manner of engagement is addressed as follows:
Problem: Context is ignored in ethical issue determination
Issue: It is reduced to some set of presupposed factors
Expert opinion tends to import tacit assumptions and framings into ethical issue determination processes that displace the perspectives of social actors. These perspectives are accessible, through attention paid to social expression - narrative information.
Solution: Use expert opinions to set horizons for contexts, not determination of issues, based upon interpretation of narrative information.
Using this information, information that faithfully reproduces the perspectives of social actors, it will be possible to construct the norms that condition that context (and the people who inhabit it). Using detailed information on the nature of the technology R&D proposed it will be a possibility to use the knowledge of these conditions in order to hypothesise ethical issues that will arise. These issues can then feature in the R&D itself as a new part of the technical challenge.
Re-Purposing Tools - Context, Communication and Capacity
ETICA's D4.2 has developed an account of ethics in contrast with approaches that have prevailed so far. Rather than waiting for an ethical issue to emerge, this approach deals with the very nature of ethics to prevent the emergence of problems.
Ethical assessment needs to ask
- What ethical issues are there?
- For whom are they issues?
- Why do they arise as issues?
- On what basis are they determined as issues?
Overall, part of the changed mindset regarding ethics would be the notion that ethical governance tools are useful or not depending upon why, how and when they are used. Existing measures can be re-purposed as follows:
a) Ethical guidelines and Check list
A starting point for reflection, not an end in themselves
b) National Ethics Committees and Fora
Public communicative engagement, not just consultation or one-way 'education'
c) Experts and expert panels
Self-consciously bringing sectoral views to construct the context - setting horizons for reflection rather than determining issues
d) Ethics review procedure and Ethics Review Report Procedure
Discursive engagement, mutual learning, not just legal compliance
e) Follow up and audit
A well-grounded, guiding questionnaire will provide a principled basis on which to surpass the problems identified in the current ethical offering. It will raise the right questions for ethics. At the stage of ethics review procedure and for proposal writers, for example, this questionnaire will provide the capacity for ethical reflection. This capacity has been assumed up to now. A questionnaire based in the theory of norms developed in D4.2 clears the ground for a thoroughgoing ethical reflection. Unlike law, ethics cannot be enforced and so the most that can be done is to provide the material to facilitate ethics.
Recommendations
One of ETICA's research outcomes is to give recommendations particularly to policy makers on how to look at and deal with ethical issues of emerging technologies with the view that these will be thought through and incorporated early on as a technology emerges. Through its various work packages and dissemination activities which attracted input and feedback from various quarters of society, recommendations have begun to emerge as research and analysis has progressed. This section gives a synthesis of these recommendations. To provide a scientifically based approach the recommendations have mainly emerged from the different stages of the work undertaken by each work package (WP) beginning with:
- WP1 which identified emerging technologies
- WP2 which identified and analysed ethical issues of these emerging technologies
- WP3 which evaluated and ranked the ethical issues from different perspectives according to their severity and likelihood
- WP4 which continues to look at governance structures of ethical issues.
As each of the above WPs fed into each other's WPs to produce an overall picture of the research findings and eventual recommendations, the recommendations coming from the different components of the ETICA project add value to the type of recommendations that will be outlined because they ensure that different facets of ethics of emerging technologies are dealt with.
By exploring technologies, ethical issues and current ways to address these, the ETICA project has developed the following recommendations:
Recommendations for policy makers
Policy makers have an important role to create the regulatory framework and the infrastructure to allow ethics to be considered in ICT. ETICA recommends the following three main areas of policy activity:
Provide regulatory framework which will support Ethical Impact Assessment for ICTs
- To raise awareness of the importance of ethics in new ICTs;
- To encourage ethical reflexivity within ICT research and development;
- To provide appropriate tools and methods to identify and address ethical issues;
- To address the wide range of current and new ethical issues arising from ICT, modelled along the lines of environmental, privacy or equality impact assessments;
- To allow ICT professionals to use their expertise in emerging ICTs to contribute to ethical solutions;
- To raise awareness of ethical issues regarding animals and environmental issues;
- To proactively consider legal solutions to foreseeable problems that will likely arise from the application of future and emerging technologies.
Establish an ICT Ethics Observatory
- To collect and communicate the conceptual, methodological, procedural and substantive aspects of ICT ethics
- To provide a community-owned publicly accessible repository and dissemination tool of research on ICT ethics
- To give examples of approaches and governance structures that allow addressing ethical issues
- To disseminate past and current research ethics and ICT including relevant work packages and deliverables and relevant National Ethics Committee opinions
- To facilitate the Ethical Impact Assessment
- To provide an early warning mechanism for issues that may require legislation
While the first recommendation aimed at providing a procedural framework for identifying and addressing ethical issues in ICT, this set of recommendations aims to provide the content required for actual responsibility ascriptions. The work undertaken by the ETICA project, for example, provides important pointers towards possible ethical issues to be considered. Individuals involved in technical development are often not experts in these matters. A shared repository of ethics-related theories, practices, methodologies etc. is a necessary condition for the successful ascriptions of responsibilities and the related sharing of good practice.
Establish a forum for stakeholder involvement
- To allow and encourage civil society and its representations, industry, NGOs and other stakeholders to exchange ideas and express their views;
- To exchange experience between these stakeholders to develop ethical reflexivity in the discussion;
- To reach consensus concerning good practice in the area of ethics and ICT;
- To build a bridge between civil society and policy makers.
This final recommendation for policy makers points to the necessity of institutionalising important discourses that allow civil society and other stakeholders to engage on a content level with the policy as well as the technical community. Such a forum is required to ensure that responsible innovation covers not only specific technical interests and perspectives but is allowed to reflect broader societal concerns. In terms of a theory of responsibility, the forum contributes to the definition of the object of responsibility: what is it that should be achieved and what does responsibility need to be ascribed for?
Recommendations for Industry and Researchers and CSOs
Industry, researchers and other individuals or organisations should adhere to the following recommendations in order to be proactive and allow innovation to be socially responsible. If the institutional framework, background, repository and societal discourses are there, then the conditions will be favorable for the incorporation of ethics and reflexivity into technical work and application usage.
Incorporate ethics into ICT research and development
- To make it explicit that ethical sensitivity is in the interest of ICT users and providers;
- To distinguish between law and ethics and see that following legal requirements is not always sufficient to address ethical issues;
- To engage in discussion of what constitutes ethical issues and be open to incorporation of gender, environmental and other issues.
The points of this recommendation aim to ensure that specific responsibility ascriptions are realised within technical work. It furthermore aims to sensitise possible subjects of responsibility some of the difficulties of discharging their responsibilities.
Facilitate ethical reflexivity in ICT projects and practice
- To realise that ethical issues are context-dependent and need specific attention of individuals with local knowledge and understanding;
- To simultaneously consider the identification of ethical issues and their resolutions;
- To be open about the description of the project and its ethical issues;
- To encourage broader stakeholder engagement in the identification and resolution of ethical questions.
This final set of suggestions aims to ensure that the different subjects of responsibility realise that responsibility is not a pre-determined and fixed structure. Possible objects of responsibility are context-dependent and need to be interpreted in the particular situation. Interpretive flexibility of technology requires the participants in a technology development project to engage collectively in the initial definition of ethical issues to consider, but also to review this initial definition continuously and engage with stakeholders involved in other stages of the technology development process.
The ETICA project provides details, suggestions and a starting point for all of these recommendations.
ETICA - What next?
The ETICA project ended in May 2011. The development and use of ICT will not end, and neither will the ethical issues that are caused by such technologies. ETICA has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of emerging ICTs and their ethical consequences. The findings of ETICA allow researchers, industry and policy makers to develop a deeper understanding of possible and likely consequences of technology. ETICA provides a set of tools that allow those stakeholders to be proactive about such issues.
However, as stressed throughout the project, this perspective is fallible. On the one hand, there is no guarantee that the ETICA analysis has indeed identified the most important technologies. The ethical issues raised about these technologies may or may not come to pass. On the other hand, it is more than likely that novel technological developments will appear which were impossible to detect using the methodological approach of the project.
In any event, it is important to understand that ETICA provides a snapshot of what currently seem to be issues one can reasonably expect to be become relevant. Such a snapshot, by its very nature, loses currency quickly. It is therefore important to think about how the ETICA findings can be used as a basis for a sustainable way of dealing with ethics of new ICTs.
To answer this question, it is useful to distinguish between the substantive and the procedural aspects of the ethics of ICT. Substantive issues are those that directly pertain to moral views and perceptions. Those are the things that are good or bad, that are subject to debate and that are contested between stakeholders. In the ETICA project, work package 2 was dedicated to identifying those substantive issues and they were subsequently evaluated by work package 3.
Procedural issues are those that have to do with the question of which processes or procedures will allow identifying and addressing substantive issues. Those are related to more abstract questions of ethical evaluation of moral issues, but also to procedures that may allow addressing ethical issues. In the ETICA project, such questions were to a large degree covered by the question of ethical governance as investigated by work package 4.
Potential Impact:
Policy Impact
This report summarises the main findings and recommendations of the ETICA project. Implementing these recommendations will contribute to better and ethically more sensitive processes of technology development. By incorporating the views of all stakeholders the benefits of novel technologies will be maximised and ethical risks can be addressed early. ICT has now attained such a cross-cutting and central role in business, research and society at large that we can no longer afford to ignore its possible downsides. Following these recommendations will give the European Union the opportunity to show world-wide leadership and set positive standards based on its shared values.
ETICA has made significant inroads in disseminating these findings and influencing policy and practice in ICT ethics, in particular on the European level. Noteworthy examples of this include:
- ETICA / STOA Parliament event
The final event of the ETICA project was co-hosted by the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessments Panel. The event was held in the European Parliament on 31.03.2011. It attracted a number of high-ranking decision makers from policy, research and industry. Among the speakers contributing to the event was the Director of the European Research Area, the CEO of the European Science Foundation and the European Data Protection Supervisor. Industry was represented by numerous companies, including Google and IBM.
- The European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) Opinion on the ethical issues of ICT
The EGE is an advisory body reporting directly to the President of the European Commission. It has been tasked by the President to publish an Opinion on ethical issues of ICT. ETICA coordinator Prof B. Stahl and WP4 leader Prof P. Goujon were among the first external experts to present their views to the EGE in preparation of this Opinion. Their presentations were based on the findings and recommendations of the ETICA project. This Opinion is going to influence policy beyond the FP7 research area. The EGE's website states that "the Opinion may offer a reference point to the Commission to promote a responsible use of the Digital Agenda for Europe and facilitate the societal acceptance of such an important policy item. The Opinion should take into consideration different possible applications of ICT, such as widespread take-up and use by citizens of the internet?-health and use of ICT in environmental and agricultural domains."
- EU training event
ETICA in collaboration with EGAIS prepared and held a two day training event for ethics experts and project officers. This took place in Brussels in April 2011 and allowed interaction with these individuals who are key to practice with regards to ethics and ICT.
- EU Recommendations on responsible innovation to Member States
The EU DG RTD, Directorate B (European Research Area) is preparing a recommendation for Member States on the topic of "responsible innovation". ETICA coordinator, B. Stahl, was invited as a participant in the first preparatory workshop in May 2011 which was aimed at developing the principles of responsible innovations and ways to achieve it.
Final EU ETICA Event
ETICA co-hosted its final event on 31 March 2011 with the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel (STOA). This event was held at the European Parliament in Brussels. Event proceedings can be viewed by visiting the ETICA website at http://www.etica-project.eu and clicking on EU EVENT VIDEO LINK
EU training event
The EU Training which was a collaboration between the ETICA and EGAIS projects took place in Brussels on 26th and 27th April 2011.
Two ETICA International Conferences
ETICA had scheduled two international conferences during its project span. The first was held in 2010 and the second in 2011.
Two Policy Briefing Sessions
ETICA had lined up two policy briefing sessions during the project's duration. The first was held in Torino, Italy and the second in Brussels, Belgium. Below is a brief of both:
ETICA was invited to present its project at the ESOF event which was held in Torino, Italy from the 2nd to the 7th of July 2010. ESOF2010 was an open laboratory to experiment scientific, technological, and multimedia innovation and a window on the world of the young and the most creative. All of ETICA's full presentations were captured on video and can be accessed from: (see http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ESOF+ETICA&aq=f online).
The second policy briefing session of the ETICA project was implemented as an aspect of the ETICA final event on 31 March 2011. The event was co-hosted by ETICA and the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment panel (STOA). Event details can be viewed via video link by visiting the ETICA website and clinking on the EU EVENT VIDEO LINK
Summer School
The summer school was held in collaboration with IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) WGs 9.2 9.6./11.7 11.4 11.6 and the EU FP7 PrimeLife project. It took place in Helsingborg, Sweden, from the 2nd to the 6th of August 2010. The topic covered was Emerging Information and Communication Technologies and resulting ethical, privacy and identity issues which was part of the PrimeLife/IFIP theme on Privacy and Identity Management for Life. To explore these issues, ETICA invited Master's and/or PhD students from different disciplines whose work looks at future and emerging technologies including ethics, privacy and identity management to submit paper for consideration at the Summer School.
Collaboration with other projects
Follow-up work
There are several activities that follow from ETICA activities and that have been accepted or are ongoing at the time of writing of this second periodic report. The list below gives a brief overview of those projects and activities.
Address of the Project Public Website and Relevant Contact Details
The project website will remain available under the URL http://www.etica-project.eu It has been migrated from its current location to a new website, which is hosted on a server of the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility.
The new website will contain all static aspects of the ETICA project, including deliverables, publications etc. The dynamic aspect, namely the descriptions of technologies, ethics, and evaluation as well as governance and recommendations have been moved into a wiki. This is a first step towards the implementation of the ETICA recommendation of providing an ICT ethics observatory. The form of a wiki was chosen because it allows general access to the content and therefore fulfils the criterion of the observatory to be community owned.
Project website: http://www.etica-project.eu