Abstract
In the middle of the twentieth century scholars in the social sciences and humanities have reflected on how the telegraph, the telephone and TV have shaped our societies (A good example is the work of Ithiel de Sola Pool in the mid twentieth century. See for example Politics in Wired Nations, Selected Writings, Transaction Publishers, London/New York.). In the last 30 years, researchers in a variety of disciplines such as technology assessment, computer ethics, information and library science, science and technology studies and cultural and media studies have conducted research into the way new media, computers and mobile phones have turned a wired society into a full-fledged digital society. In the last 10 years we have entered a new phase of the digital shaping of society. We are trying to come to grips with artificial intelligence, big data, social media, smart phones, robotics, the Internet of Things, apps and bots, self-driving cars, deep learning and brain interfaces. New digital technologies have now given rise to a hyper-connected society. IT is not only getting in between people, but it is also getting under our skin and into our heads—often literally. Our standard ways of keeping tabs on technology by means of information technology assessment, tech policy and regulation, soft law, ethical codes for IT professionals, ethical review boards (ERBs) for computer science research, standards and software maturity models and combinations thereof, are no longer sufficient to lead us to a responsible digital future. Our attempts to shape our technologies are often too late and too slow (e.g. by means of black letter law) or too little or too weak (e.g. codes of conduct). The field of privacy and data protection is an example of both. Data protection lawyers are constantly trying to catch up with the latest in big data analysis, the Internet of things, deep learning and sensor and cloud technology. On any given day, we often find ourselves trying to regulate the technology of tomorrow with legal regimes of yesterday. This gives rise to the question ‘How should we make our ethics bear upon high impact and dynamical digital phenomena?’
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Al Abdulkarim LO, Lukszo Z (2009) Smart metering for the future energy systems in the Netherlands. In: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on critical infrastructures at Linköping University, March 27–April 30, 2009 and 28–30 April, 2009
AlAbdulkarim L, Lukszo Z (2011, April) Impact of privacy concerns on consumers’ acceptance of smart metering in the Netherlands. In: Networking, Sensing and Control (ICNSC), 2011 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 287–292. IEEE
Brey P (2001) Disclosive computer ethics. In: Spinello RA, Tavani HT (eds) Readings in cyberethics. Jones and Bartlett, Sudbury, pp 51–62
Camp LJ (2003) Design for trust. In: Falcone R (ed) Trust, reputation and security: theories and practice. Springer, Berlin
Clark A, Chalmers DJ (1998) The extended mind. Analysis 58:10–23
Cowan RS (1985) More work for mother: the ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave. Basic Books, New York
Epstein R, Robertson RE (2015) The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections. Proc Natl Acad Sci 112(33):E4512–E4521. doi:10.1073/pnas.1419828112. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 4547273. PMID 26243876
Flanagan M et al (2005) Values at play: design tradeoffs in socially-oriented game design. In: Conference on human factors in computing systems, pp 751–760
Flanagan M et al (2008) Values in design: theory and practice. In: Van den Hoven MJ, Weckert J (eds) Information technology and moral philosophy. Cambridge University Press, New York (in press)
Friedman B (1997) Human values and the design of computer technology (CSLI lecture notes; no. 72). Cambridge University Press, New York
Friedman B (1999) Value-sensitive design: a research agenda for information technology. National Science Foundation, Contract No: SBR-9729633
Friedman B (2004) Value sensitive design. In: Bainbridge WS (ed) Berkshire encyclopedia of human-computer interaction. Berkshire Publishing Group, Great Barrington
Friedman B et al (2002) Value sensitive design: theory and methods. Technical report 02-12-01
Garcia F, Jacobs B (2011) Privacy friendly energy metering via homomorphic encryption. Lect Notes Comput Sci 6710:226–238
Jawurek M et al (2011) Plug-in privacy for smart metering billing. Lect Notes Comput Sci 6794:192–210
Lansing JS (1991) Priests and programmers: technologies of power in the engineered landscape of Bali. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Latour B (1992) Where are the missing masses? In: Bijker W, Law J (eds) Shaping technology-building society. Studies in sociotechnical change. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 225–259
Mumford L (1964) Authoritarian and democratic technics. Technol Cult 5(1):1–8
Nissenbaum H (2001) How computer systems embody values. IEEE Comput 34(3):118–120
Pariser E (2011) The filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. Penguin, London
Pommeranz A (2012) Designing human centered systems for reflective decision making. Dissertation. TUDelft, Delft
Tange H (2008) Electronic patient records in the Netherlands. http://hpm.org/en/Surveys/BEOZ_Maastricht_-_Netherlands/12/Electronic_patient_records_in_the_Netherlands.html
Thaler R, Sunstein C (2008) Nudge: the gentle power of choice architecture. Yale, New Haven
Van den Hoven MJ (2007a) Moral methodology and information technology. In: Tavani HT, Himma K (eds) Handbook of computer ethics. Wiley, Hoboken
Van den Hoven MJ (2007b) ICT and value sensitive design. In: Goujon P et al (eds) The information society: innovation, legitimacy, ethics and democracy. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 67–73
Van den Hoven MJ (2012) Neutrality and technology: Ortega Y Gasset on the good life. In: Brey P et al (eds) The good life in a technological age. Routledge, London, pp 327–339
Van den Hoven MJ et al (2012) Engineering and the problem of moral overload. Sci Eng Ethics 18:143–155
Van den Hoven MJ (2013) Value sensitive design and responsible innovation. In: Owen R et al (eds) Responsible innovation. Wiley, Chichester, pp 75–85
van den Hoven J, Vermaas P, van de Poel I (2015) Handbook of ethics, values and technological design. Springer, Netherlands
Van den Hoven MJ et al (2017) Designing in ethics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. forthcoming
van der Hoven J, Manders-Huits N (2009) Value-sensitive design. In: Olsen JKB, Pedersen SA, Hendricks VF (eds) A companion to the philosophy of technology. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. doi:10.1002/9781444310795.ch86
Van Twist M (2010). URL: www.rijksoverheid.nl/bestanden/.../rapport-het-epd-voorbij.pdf
Winner L (1980) Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus 109(1):121–136
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this paper
Cite this paper
van den Hoven, J. (2017). Ethics for the Digital Age: Where Are the Moral Specs?. In: Werthner, H., van Harmelen, F. (eds) Informatics in the Future. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55735-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55735-9_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-55734-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-55735-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)