Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize many industries across the world. However, artificial intelligence systems raise a series of ethical challenges that hamper their sustainable development. These challenges have often been discussed from a philosophical or theoretical perspective, but rarely from the more practical perspective of businesses. The lack of such a perspective for the ICT-sector in the Netherlands has formed a barrier to develop adequate ethical governance mechanisms. Specifically, the scarcity of practical data of ethical challenges and governance of business in the industry has made it difficult to establish the quality of the current code of ethics for the industry and the need for additional ethical governance measures. This research provides a descriptive study of ethical challenges and ethical governance of AI for ICT-businesses in the Netherlands. A form of mixed methodology (i.e., the exploratory sequential method) combines literature, interviews, and a questionnaire to acquire the relevant data. The results of these three methods are triangulated to identify room for improvement in the current code of ethics and identify the need for additional governance measures. Explainability, fairness, safety, and privacy were identified as the most pressing ethical challenges for businesses in the industry. This research also found that the first three of these challenges are currently insufficiently addressed in the code of ethics for the ICT-industry. Moreover, this study found a significantly low level of ethical governance of AI among small and medium-sized enterprises as compared to large companies. Future research should focus on further normative argumentation on principles for explainability, fairness, and safety to improve the code of ethics. Furthermore, this work lays the basis for researching and developing different concrete ethical governance measures of AI for the industry, especially for SMEs.

Smart grid systems (SGSs) are often considered as enablers to the transition to a sustainable economy and power system, because they integrate ICT with renewable energy into the electricity grid. Seemingly, there are societal concerns regarding the impact of SGSs, which underlie ethical values. Due to a lack of understanding and thus consideration of public values in the design of SGSs, these emerging innovations are not adopted on a large-scale yet. This research project argues that public values can be acknowledged as relevant factors (i.e. social barriers and drivers) for the adoption of smart grid technologies. As such, contestation of public values might lead to deadlock of technology implementation. This thesis aims to provide insights about ethical values that can be associated with SGSs. For this purpose, a literature review is carried out related to this topic in order to identify and conceptualise values at stake for smart grids and their related technologies. Thereafter, a qualitative content analysis of the British public debate on SGSs (assumed to be represented by national newspaper reports) is carried out in order to empirically uncover the normative stances (i.e. ethical values) of smart grid stakeholders and how those values are related. The result is a network of related values and conceptualisations. This network can be used by the energy industry and policy-makers to tackle challenges in designing for values in SGSs, from both a technical and institutional perspective. As a result, ethically and socially better energy systems can be reached. Additionally, the findings serve as a basis for future research regarding the relative importance of the identified values, the dynamics of the public debate, translation of values into design requirements, and to expand value sensitive design into the energy domain through case studies on SGSs in different countries.

When discussing media, parasocial phenomena is mentioned. Audience members naturally partake in parasocial phenomena when consuming media and empathizing with media figures. Viewers who form relationships with a media figure despite never meeting them are said to be in a parasocial relationship. On YouTube, examples of parasocial interactions occur when content creators request likes, subscriptions, or thank viewers for watching. While existing literature recognizes that viewers form parasocial relationships with YouTube content creators, there is not enough emphasis on understanding the content creators’ perspectives. This thesis helps to understand how content creators experience being the target of parasocial relationships. Furthermore, the general feelings and emotions of content creators are probed in order to extract the values of content creators, such that content creators’ unique experiences can be analyzed and educated recommendations can be given to relevant stakeholders. Eight interviews were held with content creators who are the face of their channel. Three main research questions were formulated: (RQ2) How and to what extent do content creators experience parasocial phenomena on the YouTube platform? (RQ3) What moral challenges do content creators experience when connecting with their audience or expressing themselves in their content? (RQ4) How does the YouTube platform influence the ways in which content creators are able to communicate their values to their audience? To ensure these research questions were answered, a set of propositional statements were formulated from the existing literature. Each proposition consists of one specific element which may be supported by interview findings. When compounded, these propositions answer their relevant research question. For RQ2, propositions include Interviewee holds influence over their audience, has met a viewer in person, has audience members similar to themselves, and does not have the same amount of knowledge about the viewer as the viewer has about them. For RQ3, propositions include Interviewee interprets their audience as a group rather than as individuals, communicates with their audience members outside of their video content, feels they need to be professional in their YouTube content, creates videos as a creative outlet, creates videos because it is fun for them, and feels connected to their audience. For RQ4, propositions include Interviewee is aware of the YouTube algorithm affecting the platform, receives financial benefits or a stream of income from YouTube, feels authentic on YouTube, is exposed to tools to grow their YouTube audience, and has confronted their values when making decisions on YouTube. Interviewees’ anecdotal evidence directly support findings that YouTube content creators value at least one or more of the following: self-expression, creativity, loyalty, community, credibility, authenticity, entertainingness, education, fiscal opportunity, social justice, content quality, pride in self or work, appreciation for viewers, and filling a niche. YouTube is a socio-technical system with an immeasurable number of users every single day. YouTube should be honest with their content creators and viewers, as the YouTube platform would not exist in its current state without them. Calls for future research and explicit recommendations are given to relevant stakeholders about how to handle parasocial phenomena.

The world is experiencing a new technological revolution that can have profound implications for the nature of work. Currently, attention is particularly focused on the implication of the increased adoption of industrial robots. Multiple studies predict that especially developing countries are at risk to be negatively affected by robotization in the near future, in ways such as unemployment and greater income inequality. To a large extent, developing countries became integrated in the world economy through their involvement in global value chains (GVCs). The establishment of GVCs, in turn, were a direct result of an upward trend in offshoring. However, because both offshoring and industrial robots primarily affect routine and labor-intensive tasks, the labor-cost advantage of developing countries is quickly eroding and puts at risk their strong export position. Furthermore, in recent year world trade is indeed observed to slow down, which has further fueled concerns. This thesis aims to quantify how much the adoption of industrial robots in developed countries contributed to the decline in world trade experienced in recent years. We do this by regressing a measure of offshoring on the density of industrial robots and other control variables. Offshoring is quantified in terms of the offshoring index, which is constructed using two datasets by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). To get data on the adoption of industrial robots, we use a dataset that has been made available by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). The final unbalanced panel dataset consist of 29 countries, 15 industries and spans the period 1993-2015. The other factors that will be controlled for in the models include: labor intensity, wages, year-dummies, country-trends and industry-trends. Furthermore, we estimate the models using fixed-effects. Our regression estimates provide evidence for a negative and statistically significant relationship between the adoption of industrial robots and offshoring intensity. We estimate that if the density of industrial robots increases by 10% in OECD countries, then offshoring decreases by 0.29%. Furthermore, we investigate if the effects are particularly strong for certain industries. We find that the effect between robotization and offshoring particularly holds true for industries that have already robotized the most in relative terms. We conclude by discussing several policies that can help developing countries to tackle the disruptive effects of automation and safeguard their future economic development.

Emotions and moral values have gained attention in recent researches in philosophy and ethics of engineering. This is due to its usefulness in assessing the technological risks imposed towards its user or society. Furthermore, moral emotions assist in reflection of moral values and research stress upon involving emotions in design practices. Moreover, researchers argue that engineers are the people who spend the most time with the development of technology. Thus, they must consider their emotions to influence moral values to mitigate risks that are associated with the technology. However, to what extent this prevails among engineers was not clear. Thus, through the use of semi-structured interviews with software engineers, this exploratory research shows the underwhelming role of moral emotions among engineers. The findings also showcase the perception of software engineers towards the involvement of moral values as something insignificant in the design practices. Lastly, this research recommends acknowledging the emotional responses of engineers by the management, training engineers as virtue ethicists and encouraging imaginative capacities and drawing attention to values for engineers during engineering design phases.

There is still much debate in the safety literature about how to deal with the complexi- ties and dynamics of large-scale socio-technological systems especially. How, for in- stance, comes safety about in ‘high-tech’ complex systems? Also, how should assess- ments of technological (or artefactual) safety be performed in these kinds of systems? This thesis attempts to provide some practical applications and guidelines for these kinds of assessments, in real-life settings specifically. To this, four empirical studies of several high-tech military systems are discussed, and then how these studies were used for gaining a more adequate understanding of the dynamics of technological (or artefactual) safety in large-scale socio-technological systems in general. The thesis dis- cusses furthermore a study after the concept of responsible innovation, which is a field that closely relates to technological safety. This particular study points out that what was found for the assessment of technological safety could also be helpful for related allocations of responsibility in the systems studied here. An important factor appears to be in this all, that in practice the social and the technolo- gical (or artefactual) domain are linked in these kinds of systems to an extent that is not often acknowledged. Assessments of technological or artefactual safety in large-scale socio-technological systems, as well as allocations of responsibility in these kinds of systems, require, therefore, an empirical analysis of the socio-technological dynamics involved. These assessments and moral judgments should attempt, in short, to make sense of the empirical complexities in real-life settings. Important in this is that they should take into account – but also account for – the interactions between the tech- nologies (or artefacts) studied and the social structure(s) that these technologies (or artefacts) are embedded within.@en

In response to the pressing demand for elderly care, care robots, the robots used by care receivers and/or caregivers for care purposes in various settings, such as hospitals, nursing homes, and personal residences were introduced and have been gaining traction as a technological solution to improve care quality and to enhance the value of autonomy. Despite all the benefits offered by robotic innovations, the consequent ethical issues in human-robot relationships in elderly care warrant sustained scrutiny. Due to the technological breakthroughs in robotics and its impacts on relationships in elderly care, the conventional dyadic human-robot interaction (HRI) model which focuses on one human and one robot, and the dominant Western individualistic understanding of autonomy are insufficient for the ethical evaluation of robots in elderly care.@en