Paul Hayes

Background Higher education institutions, particularly universities of technology, are ideally situated to advance critical inquiry and implementation of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and digital transformation. This is a fundamental mission of higher education and universities of technology, to act as generators and incubators of technological innovation and educating and training the innovators of tomorrow in responsible and ethical conduct. In this brief communication, we will set out to outline policy positions for actors (at policy-making level as well as those in university management and governance) in higher education institutions to consider in order to support responsible and sustainable digital transformation. Moreover, here we outline our position that it is time for a paradigm shift in digital transformation that attempts to separate it from neoliberal economic models and mindsets, and looks to alternative epistemologies and political economies (and ontologies) for ecologically sustainable and ethical digital transformation. Here we propose a concept of bifurcation, or a radical break or fork, or series of forks, from the deleterious and unsustainable practices and systems of the past that have led to a global ecological emergency. We propose to use an interdisciplinary notion of bifurcation in order to underline the need to facilitate and foster a radical change of recent culture and late-modern societies – supported and enabled by the best digital technologies that we do have and fostering also the inception and implementation of innovative new technologies fit for the purpose of this bifurcation.

Algorithms and AI tools are becoming increasingly influential artefacts in commercial and governance contexts. Algorithms and AI tools are not value neutral; to some extent they must be rendered knowable and known as objects, and in their implementation and deployment, to see clearly and understand their implications for moral values, and what actions can be undertaken to optimise them in their design and use towards ethical goals, or whether they are even suitable for particular goals. Transparency is a term with variable uses and interpretations, a problem which can challenge its use in design and policy. Here, we attempt to further clarify transparency. We argue that transparency is the state of affairs that obtains when relevant and understandable information about some X is available and accessible to some target audience (A), so that this information is sufficient for A for the purpose (P). Moreover, we connect this conceptualisation with transparency’s moral value, where P is to provide an account about X’s supportive or conflicting relationship with relevant values and goals. Such teleological ends in our context here can be the ability to account for the degree to which an algorithm, process or organisation respects certain values and is conducive to (social) goals.

The question of how we can use ethics and ethical frameworks to avert the negative consequences of AI through guidance on human behaviour and the design of technological systems has recently been receiving increasing attention. The appropriate response to an ethics of AI has certainly been contentious. For some years the wisdom of deontology and utilitarianism in the ethics of technology has been questioned. Today, a kind of AI ethics principlism has gained a degree of widespread acceptance, yet it still invites harsh rejections in recent scholarship. In this paper, we wish to explore the contribution to an ethics of AI made by a narrative philosophy and ethics of technology inspired by the ‘little ethics’ of Paul Ricoeur, and virtue ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre, most recently and promisingly built upon by Wessel Reijers and Mark Coeckelbergh. The objective of this paper is to examine the extent to which a narrative and virtue based ethics (or, VPD, i.e., virtuous practice design) might be a plausible candidate for the foundation of an ethics of AI, or rather ethical AI practice. This will be achieved by exploring the ways in which this approach can respond to some of the significant faults with or critiques of applied and principles and guidelines based ethical approaches to AI ethics.

A significant and burgeoning problem associated with artificial intelligence is its capacity to generate mirrors of ourselves, or digital duplicates of varying complexity consisting of our likeness and (perhaps ostensibly) behaviors, using our personal information. This chapter will explore how digital duplicates impact our narrative identity, relying upon Paul Ricoeur’s narrative philosophy to argue that digital duplicates undermine or challenge the construction of personal identity through narrative in appropriating elements of the idem (sameness) and interfering with our ipse (selfhood). This challenge is generated and exacerbated by, and compounds, breaks in the contextual integrity of our personal information, and therefore causes a rupture in narrative privacy itself, where narrative privacy is a state of being able to narrate our lives without arbitrary or unjust efforts to read or co-author those narratives by third parties. We argue that there are two key sources of harm to the narrative self and privacy in the case of digital duplicates: the other or corporation responsible for constructing the duplicate, and the digital duplicate itself, which can transmit both true and untrue information about its subject with little regard to the appropriateness of the receivers of the information. This occurs through a mixture of abuse of the idem self, and possibly an imitation of the ipse by duplicates that can represent changes in disposition over time. The result is constrained capacity to narrate and become who we wish to be.

AI for good, and AI for sustainability projects, are being developed by often well-meaning innovators across the world, intending to support initiatives in sustainable development. Some such projects have been positioned within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. In this paper, we critically engage with this phenomenon using a virtue-based Ricoeurian narrative philosophy. Through conceptual analysis and normative argumentation, we make a theoretical contribution to scholarship on this topic. We argue that SDGs could be regarded as internationally agreed high-order end-norms that crystallise values considered to constitute the good life. We argue for exercising caution in applying SDGs as end-norms to AI projects as they are of a high order, are not directly action guiding, and threaten to sediment presentist dominant values. We argue for narrative hospitality between AI innovators and community stakeholders to guide reflection on specifying the SDGs to more situated contexts and to support the development of AI systems that may be more contextually appropriate, and more capable of supporting plural visions of the good life. Such narrative hospitality represents accommodation between parties, but refusal or resistance to engagement with AI innovators can be justified when community interests are not respected, and actors within AI industries can also be morally obliged to resist or refuse development or deployment of systems for contextually inappropriate environments that would be incompatible with a critical reading of the SDGs formed in narrative exchange with the other.

The first objective of this paper is to recognize the role of emotion and feeling in Ricœur’s “little ethics” and what they can further add to it, then to explore in more detail how solicitude as a virtue, and affective disposition more broadly, can contribute to a modern ethics of technology. Ultimately, emotions help us to understand technologies and technological ways of being today; Ricœur’s “little ethics”, along with his narrative theory, provide a framework for understanding the ethically salient aspects of technical practice, especially through the openness to the other demanded by solicitude, and essentially by emphasising emotion or feeling as a way of being in the world, and a mode of existence: one which is done with, if not sometimes because of, technology and technical practice.

This paper builds upon recent work in narrative theory and the philosophy of technology by examining the place of transparency and responsibility in discussions of AI, and what some of the implications of this might be for thinking ethically about AI and especially AI practices, that is, the structured social activities implicating and defining what AI is. In this paper, we aim to show how pursuing a narrative understanding of technology and AI can support knowledge of process and practice through transparency, as well help summon us to responsibility through visions of possibility and of actual harms arising from AI practices. We provide reflections on the relations between narrative, transparency and responsibility, building an argument that narratives (about AI, practices, and those persons implicated in its design, implementation, and deployment) support the kind of knowing and understanding that is the aim of transparency, and, moreover, that such knowledge supports responsibility in informing agents and activating responsibility through creating knowledge about something that can and should be responded to. Furthermore, we argue for considering an expansion of the kinds of practices that we might legitimately consider ‘AI practices’ given the diverse set of (often materially embedded) activities that sustain and are sustained by AI that link directly to its ethical acceptability and which are rendered transparent in the narrative mode. Finally, we argue for an expansion of narratives and narrative sources to be considered in questions of AI, understanding that transparency is multi-faceted and found in stories from diverse sources and people.

PurposeThis paper aims to argue that traditional ethical theories used in disaster response may be inadequate and particularly strained by the emergence of new technologies and social media, particularly with regard to privacy. The paper suggests incorporation of care ethics into the disaster ethics nexus to better include the perspectives of disaster affected communities.Design/methodology/approachThis paper presents a theoretical examination of privacy and care ethics in the context of social media/digitally enhanced disaster response.FindingsThe paper proposes an ethics of care can fruitfully by used by public and private agents in disaster management. Its relational ontology restores the priority of fostering good relationships between stakeholders, thus giving central importance to values such as transparency and trust and the situated knowledge of disaster-affected communities.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper presents theoretical research and is limited by the availability of empirical data. There is opportunity for future research to evaluate the impact of a conscious adoption of an ethics of care by disaster management agents.Practical implicationsAn ethos of care ethics needs to be mainstreamed into disaster management organisations and digital initiatives.Social implicationsThis paper argues that power asymmetry in disaster response renders the public vulnerable to abuse, and that the adoption of care ethics can support disaster management agents in recognising this power imbalance and wielding power responsibly.Originality/valueThis paper examines the applicability of an alternative ethical framework to novel circumstances.

This article presents a conceptual investigation into the value impacts and relations of algorithms in the domain of justice and security. As a conceptual investigation, it represents one step in a value sensitive design based methodology. Here, we explicate and analyse the expression of values of accuracy, privacy, fairness and equality, property and ownership, and accountability and transparency in this context. We find that values are sensitive to disvalue if algorithms are designed, implemented or deployed inappropriately or without sufficient consideration for their value impacts, potentially resulting in problems including discrimination and constrained autonomy. Furthermore, we outline a framework of conceptual relations of values indicated by our analysis, and potential value tensions in their implementation and deployment with a view towards supporting future research, and supporting the value sensitive design of algorithms in justice and security.