The emerging technoscience of quantum technology (QT) will have a considerable impact on society. However, a broader public dialogue on societal impact and possible ethical issues of QT is currently lacking. This may relate to the fact that first, existing approaches to public engagement such as Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) often focus upon reasoning and argumentation, and second, that outreach is usually developed in a top-down setting. How could we encourage a public dialogue?

One would be excused to think that values are just “bullshit” - to use the philosophical term successfully brought from slang into philosophy by Harry Frankfurt (Frankfurt 2005). This is because both values (e.g., liberty, equality, justice) and meta-values (e.g., Ruth Chang’s parity, Michael Walzer’s complex equality) underdetermine the design process and can even be applied contradictorily on the same decision. For example, one and the same technology can be described as sustainable and not-sustainable, as serving/promoting and not promoting freedom.

This paper focuses on robotic art practices as a complementary perspective to ongoing discussions in ethics and philosophy of technology on the potentially disruptive impacts of emerging technologies such as social robots and AI. Art, through its ability to foster alternative perspectives and moral reflections, provides a unique approach to analyzing the design, use, and social meaning or implications of new technologies such as robots, thus enabling speculative theorization that extends beyond the dominant narratives emerging from robotics research and development.

Artistic approaches and performative explorations enable innovative ways to design human-robot interactions (HRI) by providing new perspectives and embodied understandings of how humans relate to technology (Gemeinboeck, 2021). We understand dance as an inherently dynamic and interactive process of alignment and, therefore, chose an explorative approach that builds on performative experiments between human performers and a social robot. Our investigations aim to understand how both parties enact their interwovenness in improvisational situations and what interdependencies emerge.

Considering the societal impact of artifacts from the early stages of design is crucial for realizing a better society. While humanities such as the philosophy of technology and applied ethics have accumulated knowledge about the social aspects of technologies, this knowledge is rarely referenced in actual technological development.

The phrase "socially disruptive" is used to characterize a bewildering range of technologies. There is a need for an apt definition of "Socially Disruptive Technologies" (SDTs), particularly for a definition that captures their ethically relevant implications – positive and negative – in ways that are suitably contextualized. In this paper, we propose, explain, and defend the following definition:

The field of AI ethics is said to be dominated by principilism approaches. Still, bridging the gap between theoretical and often ambiguous principles and their practical operationalization remains a challenge. Simultaneously, there are growing calls from within the field to include a more virtue ethics approach to AI ethics, focusing on cultivating practical wisdom in AI practitioners, without abandoning principles completely. Several approaches have been proposed, but empirical evaluations regarding their implementation and effects in practice are still lacking.

Given the impressive performance and widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs), there is a pressing need to explain how these systems work and what information they use for their predictions. This would not only allow us to better predict and control their behavior, thereby increasing their trustworthiness, but also help gain insight into the internal processes underlying linguistic behavior in LLMs. 

Anticipation is increasingly seen as a valuable methodological dimension for promoting responsible science, technology and innovation (STI) practices. Normative approaches or frameworks such as "anticipatory governance," "anticipatory ethics," "responsible innovation," "responsible research and innovation," or "technology assessment" recognize that engagements with representations of the future are valuable means for fostering critique and/or reflection on emerging technologies and innovations that may have a potentially socially disruptive character.

The concept ‘refusal’ in relation to Artificial Intelligence (AI) has attracted increased attention (e.g., Pereira, 2021). The overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, ending the right to abortion in the U.S., led Pro-choice advocates to develop Chatbot Charley (2024) to refuse this decision. Charley confidentially provides information regarding safe abortions and trustworthy doctors. It gives access to networks of knowledge critical to political concerns such as bodily autonomy, privacy, and epistemic justice.

Too often privacy and security are considered to be opposed values. But a more realistic balance between these two can be realized when we acknowledge that both concepts have different meanings. They root in various forms of surveillance, that are embedded in western culture.