Ethical and societal challenges of the approaching technological storm

Supported by the arrival of 5G and, soon 6G, digital technologies are evolving towards an artificial intelligence-driven internet of robotic and bionano things. The merging of artificial intelligence (AI) with other technologies such as the internet of things (IoT) gives rise to acronyms such as 'AIoT', 'IoRT' (IoT and robotics) and 'IoBNT' (IoT...

Micro-Targeting and ICT media in the Dutch Parliamentary system: Technological changes in Dutch Democracy

For the period surrounding the 2018 Dutch municipal elections, a team of researchers from the Delft University of Technology investigated the effect of the digital environment on parliamentary democracy. An interdisciplinary group of researchers combined expertise on digital ethics, political theory, big data analytics, the economics of privacy...

Meaningful Human Control Over Autonomous Systems: A Philosophical Account

Debates on lethal autonomous weapon systems have proliferated in the past 5 years. Ethical concerns have been voiced about a possible raise in the number of wrongs and crimes in military operations and about the creation of a “responsibility gap” for harms caused by these systems. To address these concerns, the principle of “meaningful human...

From dignity to security protocols: a scientometric analysis of digital ethics

Our lives are increasingly intertwined with the digital realm, and with new technology, new ethical problems emerge. The academic field that addresses these problems—which we tentatively call ‘digital ethics’—can be an important intellectual resource for policy making and regulation. This is why it is important to understand how the new...

Digital Twins in Health Care: Ethical Implications of an Emerging Engineering Paradigm

Personalized medicine uses fine grained information on individual persons, to pinpoint deviations from the normal. ‘Digital Twins’ in engineering provide a conceptual framework to analyze these emerging data-driven health care practices, as well as their conceptual and ethical implications for therapy, preventative care and human enhancement....

Ethics and the UN Sustainable Development Goals: The Case for Comprehensive Engineering: Commentary on “Using Student Engagement to Relocate Ethics to the Core of the Engineering Curriculum”

In the twenty-first century, the urgent problems the world is facing (the UN Sustainable Development Goals) are increasingly related to vast and intricate ‘systems of systems’, which comprise both socio-technical and eco-systems. In order for engineers to adequately and responsibly respond to these problems, they cannot focus on only one...

Science communication and Responsible Research and Innovation: How can they complement each other?

In today's society a variety of challenges need attention because they are considered to affect our well-being. Many of these challenges can be addressed with new innovations, yet they may also introduce new challenges. Communication of these new innovations is vital. This importance is also addressed by the concept of Responsible Research and...

MOOD: Massive Open Online Deliberation Platform-A Practical Application

Nowadays, public debates often take place on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter and can be characterized as asynchronous, protracted and ill-structured. The Massive Open Online Deliberation (MOOD) platform aims to structure these debates. Essential is that the platform can differentiate between the moral acceptability and the social...

Stakeholder values and platform wars: smart meters in the Netherlands

The interconnected nature of the different components of smart grids is a prime example of complexity in technological systems. Developing such systems is highly dependent on the wishes and needs of end-users and other stakeholders. We argue that stakeholder values should be taken into consideration during the design and standardisation of...