How does it come that a tiny, technical detail like the choice of the Bluetooth version, which at first glance looks as the incarnation of technological neutrality, raises mayor ethical concern? Why is it that the actors individually were not able to discern the discrimination of an AI app, but only in the collaborative act, facilitated by a reflection tool? In my contribution, I would like to show that this is precisely where the so-called principles-to-practice gap closes.

Some worry that as AI-systems become more capable and more integrated in society, we will lose control over those systems. The loss of control, some worry, may yield bad or even catastrophic outcomes. Some think that we can solve this problem in a way that avoids having to have control, simply by ensuring that the systems are value-aligned. Here is argued that value-alignment cannot solve the control problem, unless the value-alignment includes a notion of control.

In recent years, ‘human-centered artificial intelligence’ (HCAI) has emerged as a dominant framing device in contemporary AI discourse and policy. However, alongside its widespread acceptance, the phrase has received criticism. One type of critique levied against HCAI attacks its tendency towards anthropocentrism, claiming that by taking human well-being as the focus of moral considerations, HCAI is ill-equipped for addressing the harms that AI technologies pose to nonhuman animals and other elements of the natural world.

The increasing integration of algorithms into various aspects of society has raised concerns about potential biases, ethical implications, and the lack of transparency governing decision-making processes, which in turn led to a call for increased oversight. This paper will contextualise the call for increased ethical governance and oversight of algorithmic systems used within the Dutch public sector, by focusing on the aim of the proposed governance mechanisms and instruments. 

Various past and present conflicts suggest that energy can be used as a weapon (Tsafos 2022; LaBelle 2023). Affirming that energy is a weapon can mean and imply different things. It can refer to energy policies, energy and environmental laws and regulations, energy businesses, or energy socio-technical systems such as power plants or transmission lines. It can mean that a specific energy-related issue has been used to either start military hostilities or during warfare. It can indicate intrastate affairs or broader interstate geopolitical equilibria.

When Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are deployed, they are used in a particular setting. In this setting, there are people who are users, developers and other stakeholders that interact with the system directly or indirectly. The particular setting of an AI system that we are concerned with here consists thus of technological artifacts, being the AI system in question as well as any other relevant systems, as well as humans interacting with it. I thus define the AI system and the context it operates in as a sociotechnical system, centered around that specific AI system.

There is established concern that the deployment of autonomous weapons and information systems may lead to ‘moral deskilling’ of military professionals (Vallor 2013, 2015). Most of what has been written about the conditions needed to cultivate martial virtues has focused on kinetic operations, with comparatively little exploring the deskilling of intelligence practitioners and institutions (Meerveld and Lindelauf 2022). 

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a complicated system of systems that require a layered pluralistic ethical analysis. This paper beings by noting that the IoT cyber-physical system – it exists in both the physical and informational realms, and in order to give a comprehensive ethical analysis of the IoT, we have to be pluralistic in considering both physical and informational aspects. However, the paper will also suggest that the IoT requires a layered analysis.

A major concern in AI ethics is that Machine Learning systems impose determinability on human lives that are fundamentally indeterminable (Birhane, 2021). The introduction of AI and algorithmic decision-making brings with it the risk that rigid machine-like decision-making will make it impossible to make the exceptions that will inevitably be required to their output, and that categories of people who are often overlooked or omitted will not be taken into consideration by them (Star & Bowker, 2007).

When discussing digital surveillance phenomena, one image persistently comes to mind: the panopticon. In this paper, we aim to connect inquiries into AI's usage across political, economic, and social domains with the panopticon concept. Automated systems, fueled by data, monitor our preferences and desires, subtly shaping them. Through smartphones, computers, or smartwatches, individuals willingly, without knowing it though, carry their surveillance tools. 

In this presentation, the Human Condition Line presents the outcome of a collaborative research project on vulnerability. 

Digital technologies are becoming intimately interwoven with our society and our individual daily lives. As these technologies are transforming and reconfiguring people's cognitive, affective, bodily and conative capacities, there is a growing interest in the field of responsible computing in how this entanglement of human life with digital technology requires analyses that foreground human vulnerability.

Throughout the history of moral philosophy, the theoretical postures have been privileged. Modern ethics is no exception and is indeed characterized by the predominance of voluntarist and universalist frameworks (Maesschalck, 2010), which are primarily concerned with the actions of the moral agent, with no real regard for the conditions of possibility necessary for the effective realization of moral actions (Fletcher, 1966).

‘Proper function’ theories commit to the notion that artefacts possess functions that are ontologically ‘proper’ to them, and that these functions are assigned at artefact creation. According to these theories, proper functions play a crucial role in shaping our collective understanding of technological artefacts. Proper functions not only help us to determine what a given artefact is, but also offer normative benchmarks for whether artefacts are working ‘properly’.

The growing focus on repair and maintenance in philosophy of technology, urges, among other things, an attention to technologies through time, that is, how they persist, are worked on, are re-designed and reimagined over the duration of their use (Young, 2020; Steinert, forthcoming). It is the relevance that this perspective has for the built environment in times of climate change and environmental disruption that I develop in this presentation.

Since the publication of Winner’s influential article in 1980, the idea that artifacts have politics has remained a dominant theme in STS and the philosophy of technology. Yet despite exploring the political nature of artifacts from a variety of different perspectives, little of this work has paid attention to the activity of maintenance.