This report outlines the findings of an investigation conducted by the Responsible Sensing Lab, philosophy of technology experts from the ESDiT consortium (Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies) and representatives from the Smart Mobility Program of the city of Amsterdam. The investigation employs a research through design approach, merging prototyping activities, empirical studies, and philosophical reflection. It aims to explore the Driving for Values concept, focusing on car drivers’ experience of the value of autonomy and its relation to the notions of acceptability and acceptance. The Driving for Values system is framed as a voluntary navigation aid providing car drivers with so called “social routes”, which supports the municipality in fostering a variety of public values such as livability and air quality, by managing the use of the public space. Autonomy is here conceptualized as involving two main components: i) the ability to freely choose among different options and ii) the availability of meaningful options, i.e options that enable the agent to decide and act on the basis of their own reasoned values and commitments. Acceptance is conceptualized as the willingness to use the app. Acceptability refers to the system’s adherence to moral norms and principles. The goal of this investigation is to design and evaluate a variety of potential features of the Driving for Values system considering their impact on car drivers’ experience of autonomy and the effects on acceptance and acceptability of the system. Seven studies with a total of approximately 65 participants (including citizens of Amsterdam, designers and researchers) were conducted. In these studies, participants engaged with different versions of the Driving for Values system and compared their features. The insights from these studies together with insights gathered from monthly workshops with experts from academia and municipality representatives are the basis of the recommendations presented below. These recommendations are intended to support the municipality of Amsterdam in further researching and designing the Driving for Values and similar systems.

Technologies shape who we are, how we organize our societies and how we relate to nature. For example, social media challenges democracy; artificial intelligence raises the question of what is unique to humans; and the possibility to create artificial wombs may affect notions of motherhood and birth. Some have suggested that we address global warming by engineering the climate, but how does this impact our responsibility to future generations and our relation to nature? This book shows how technologies can be socially and conceptually disruptive and investigates how to come to terms with this disruptive potential. Four technologies are studied: social media, social robots, climate engineering and artificial wombs. The authors highlight the disruptive potential of these technologies, and the new questions this raises. The book also discusses responses to conceptual disruption, like conceptual engineering, the deliberate revision of concepts.

The power of technology to transform religions, science, and political institutions has often been presented as nothing short of revolutionary. Does technology have a similarly transformative influence on societies’ morality? Scholars have not rigorously investigated the role of technology in moral revolutions, even though existing research on technomoral change suggests that this role may be considerable. In this paper, we explore what the role of technology in moral revolutions, understood as processes of radical group-level moral change, amounts to. We do so by investigating four historical episodes of radical moral change in which technology plays a noteworthy role. Our case-studies illustrate the plurality of mechanisms involved in technomoral revolutions, but also suggest general patterns of technomoral change, such as technology’s capacity to stabilize and destabilize moral systems, and to make morally salient phenomena visible or invisible. We find several leads to expand and refine conceptual tools for analysing moral change, specifically by crystallizing the notions of ‘technomoral niche construction’ and ‘moral payoff mechanisms’. Coming to terms with the role of technology in radical moral change, we argue, enriches our understanding of moral revolutions, and alerts us to the depths of which technology can change our societies in wanted and unwanted ways.