Corporate social responsibility and hybrid potato breeding: balancing economic, environmental and social challenges

Hybrid potato breeding is an emerging technology that can have a strong impact on the potato sector by replacing seed potatoes with true seeds. The Netherlands is a world leader in certified seed potatoes and a number of Dutch companies play a pivotal role in the development of this technology. This implies a certain responsibility for the...

Responsibility beyond control

AI, Control and Unintended Consequences: The Need for Meta-Values

Due to their self-learning and evolutionary character, AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems are more prone to unintended consequences and more difficult to control than traditional sociotechnical systems. To deal with this, machine ethicists have proposed to build moral (reasoning) capacities into AI systems by designing artificial moral agents....

COVID-19 and Changing Values

We study value change due to the corona pandemic. With the help of topic modelling, we analysed COVID-related news articles for changes in the frequency of how often these news articles address eleven different values. We looked at news articles from six countries (US, UK, South Africa, India, Japan, South Korea) and new articles spanning a...

RRI measurement and assessment: Some pitfalls and a proposed way forward

The idea of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has become popular over the last decade to ensure that innovators take into account the social and ethical concerns that their innovations may raise, and organize their innovation processes so that they respond to the needs and values of society. In recent years, there has been increasing...

Values and Design

It has long been recognized that technology is value-laden. In the last few decades, a number of approaches—such as value sensitive design (VSD)—have been developed to systematically and explicitly address values in design. This contribution discusses four general issues that any approach aiming at integrating values into design should address: ...

Werthaltigkeit der Technik

Technologie ist eng mit Werten verbunden. Gelegentlich gefährden Technologien bestimmte Werte, beispielsweise Gesundheit und Sicherheit, so wie es 2011 bei der Atomkatastrophe in Fukushima der Fall war. Aber Technologien können auch Werte unterstützen, wie beispielsweise das menschliche Wohlbefinden, die Demokratie oder den Schutz der...

Exploring responsible innovation of large technological systems in society

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes responsible innovation in terms of both the innovation process and the innovation outcome, and in doing so it focuses on historical cases of innovation in large societally relevant technological systems. It illustrates...

Should Philosophers Begin to Employ New Methods If They Want to Become More Societally Relevant?

Core Values and Value Conflicts in Cybersecurity: Beyond Privacy Versus Security

This chapter analyses some of the main values, and values conflicts, in relation to cybersecurity by distinguishing four important value clusters that should be considered when deciding on cybersecurity measures. These clusters are security, privacy, fairness and accountability. Each cluster consists of a range of further values, which can be...

Design for values in engineering

Values have probably always played a role in engineering design. However, in current practices and design methods, the attention for values in engineering design tends to be implicit and unsystematic. Establishing Design for Values in engineering would require overcoming this situation. This contribution discusses which values play a role in...