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Norbert Wiener and the Rise of Information Ethics
Abstract
To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man's inner life, even as they belong to his life in society. Norbert Wiener SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND ETHICS. Major scientific and technological innovations often have profound social and ethical effects. For example, in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Copernicus, Newton, and other scientists developed a powerful new model of the universe. This stunning scientific achievement led to increased respect for science and for the power of human reasoning. During that same era, recently invented printing-press technology made it possible to spread knowledge far and wide across Europe, instead of leaving it, as before, in the hands of a privileged minority of scholars. Inspired by these scientific and technological achievements, philosophers, such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, re-examined human nature and the idea of a good society. They viewed human beings asrational agentscapable of thinking for themselves and acquiring knowledge through science and books. In addition, they interpreted society as a creation of informed, rational citizens working together throughsocial contracts. These philosophical developments laid foundations for ethical theories such as those of Bentham and Kant, and for political changes such as the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Today, after far-reaching scientific achievements in physics, biology, and cybernetics – and after recent technological advances in digital computing and information networks – philosophers are again rethinking the nature of human beings and of society.
... Most of this interest is the natural consequence of the rapid development and change in computer technology, its uses and its implications. Although the term "Computer Ethics" was first coined by Walter Maner (1980) as the ethical problems "aggravated, transformed or created by computer technology," Bynum (2007) argues that the roots, the evolution, and the intellectual foundations of the field of computer ethics as distinct discipline within the realm of ethics can be directly traced to the revolutionary works of the MIT computer scientist Norbert Wiener (Wiener, 1948(Wiener, , 1950(Wiener, , 1954(Wiener, and 1964. In his seminal and profound book Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine published in 1948, he discusses the importance of developing a new perspective to judge good and evil in light of our new technologies. ...
... In his seminal and profound book Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine published in 1948, he discusses the importance of developing a new perspective to judge good and evil in light of our new technologies. In 1950, Norbert Wiener went on to publish another important book titled The Human Use of Human Beings where he foresees a society based on a ubiquitous computing technology that will eventually remake the society and will radically change everything (Bynum 2007). He refers to this as the "second industrial revolution". ...
... Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man's inner life, even as they belong to his life in society." Bynum (2007) holds that the consequence of this second industrial revolution will be that the "workers must adjust to radical changes in the work place; governments must establish new laws and regulations; industry and businesses must create new policies and practices; professional organizations must develop new codes of conduct for their members; sociologists and psychologists must study and understand new social and psychological phenomena; and philosophers must rethink and redefine old social and ethical concepts." This has a profound implication for the way we need and should view information security and ethics. ...
Information security and ethics has been viewed as one of the foremost areas of concern and interest by academic researchers and industry practitioners. Information security and ethics is defined as an all encompassing term that refers to all activities needed to secure information and systems that support it in order to facilitate its ethical use. In this introductory chapter, this very important field of study is introduced and the fundamental concepts and theories are discussed. A broad discussion of tools and technologies used to achieve the goals of information security and ethics is followed by a discussion of guidelines for the design and development of such tools and technologies. Managerial, organizational and societal implications of information security and ethics are then evaluated. The chapter concludes after an assessment of a number of future developments and activities on the horizon that will have an impact on this field.
... Today, AI ethical issue is at the forefront of discussion among the academia, private and public domain (Azafrani & Gupta, 2023). Dating back to influential authors like Wiener (1954Wiener ( , 1964 and Josef Wei-zenbaum (1977) as cited in Bynum (2008) ethical implications of computers and digital technology have been the subject of a long-running academic debate. In addition, there are policy discussions and publications that have been created by governmental or parliamentary authorities (Britain, 2004;Cath et al., 2018) to provide focus on the AI debate. ...
The adoption of generative AI in educational process carries both potential advantages and risks hence there is a need for ethical principles to guide its adoption in education. A population of 443 TVET educators, including 325 male and 118 female, was selected for this study using a mixed research design from the seven TVET public institutions in south-eastern Nigeria. The study was guided by three research questions and three null hypotheses. The instruments used for data collection were a structured questionnaire and a guided interview developed by the researchers in line with the research questions. The Cronbach Alpha reliability test, which produced a reliability index of 0.9, was used to determine the internal consistency. Mean, standard deviation, factor loading and t-test were used to evaluate the data, and an independent t-test with a significance level of 0.05 was used to test the null hypotheses. The findings of the study indicated that TVET educators agreed that AI technology is an effective educational technology, there is a need for ethical principles to ensure data privacy, data integrity, data reliability, data transparency and data accuracy are not compromised. Also, TVET educators agreed that the adoption of AI technology in the educational process improves academic performance, increases learning engagement, and supports classroom inclusion and personalized learning. It was recommended that tertiary institutions broaden their current AI policies in light of the findings of this study to support the successful integration of AI technology into the educational process.
... In the current time, most of the business activities and products and services are linked with the digital (information technology) which includes the computer software, hardware, electronics, internet and E-commerce as well. The use of digital has brought a great change in conduction of business and the performance of organization as it has increased their efficiency and effectiveness (Bynum et al, 2008 The organization also uses other digital (information technology) but the digital communications plays an important role in the success of Organization business. ...
With the development of the business in the world today all the ways of production and of running and managing business have been changing all the time. All business owners and managers keep looking for the best methods and strategies which can help improve and develop their business and get better results and better revenues. With the development of the digital world or information technology they try to use and implement the suitable digital strategies that can make managing business easier and better. Big data and how to build data as a strategic asset or in other words strategic digital data management may be considered as one of the most interesting methods using information technology in business today. This strategic method is in fact a digital method in which managers or experts use the best software programs that help dealing with the data in the enterprise to make it easy to use and more secure and safe. It is a strategy that implies the use of the new programs and methods to deal with the data and the information in all kinds of enterprises.
... In the current time, most of the business activities and products and services are linked with the digital (information technology) which includes the computer software, hardware, electronics, internet and E-commerce as well. The use of digital has brought a great change in conduction of business and the performance of organization as it has increased their efficiency and effectiveness (Bynum et al, 2008 The organization also uses other digital (information technology) but the digital communications plays an important role in the success of Organization business. ...
With the development of the business in the world today all the ways of production and of running and managing business have been changing all the time. All business owners and managers keep looking for the best methods and strategies which can help improve and develop their business and get better results and better revenues. With the development of the digital world or information technology they try to use and implement the suitable digital strategies that can make managing business easier and better. Big data and how to build data as a strategic asset or in other words strategic digital data management may be considered as one of the most interesting methods using information technology in business today. This strategic method is in fact a digital method in which managers or experts use the best software programs that help dealing with the data in the enterprise to make it easy to use and more secure and safe. It is a strategy that implies the use of the new programs and methods to deal with the data and the information in all kinds of enterprises.
... The key to excellent practical reasoning and hence to being ethical is the ability to deliberate about one's goals and choose a wise course of action. Bynum (2008b) has shown that these principles of virtue ethics are relevant to and have informed ethical considerations of information technology since its early days and can be found in the work of Norbert Wiener (1954), one of the fathers of digital technology. ...
Any discussion of the ethics of AI needs to be based on a sound understanding of the concept of ethics. This chapter therefore provides a brief overview of some of the key approaches to ethics with a particular emphasis on virtue ethics and the idea of human flourishing. The chapter reviews the purposes for which AI can be used, as these have a bearing on an ethical evaluation. Three main purposes are distinguished: AI forefficiency, optimisation and profit maximisation, AI forsocial control and AI for human flourishing. Given the focus on human flourishing in this book, several theoretical positions are introduced that provide insights into different aspects and ways of promoting human flourishing. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the currently widespread principle-based approach to AI ethics.
... Norbert Wiener (1894Wiener ( -1964 is usually regarded as the founder of the field of computer, or information, ethics (Bynum, 2008;Hassan, Mingers, & Stahl, 2018). In 1950 Wiener published The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, in which he described possible harms and future benefits that computers and communication technologies might bring. ...
Digitalization has the potential to improve life in many ways, and also a tendency to waken worries and raise questions about harmful consequences and ethical implications. Such concerns are reasonable, since artificial intelligence, interconnected systems, large-scale repositories of personal data, and the use of technologies indeed relate to values among different stakeholders. This paper attempts to provide a more balanced view of ethics concerns in digitalization initiatives. We show examples of how digitalization of the public sector has the potential to make already existing ethical issues visible and known. We present three cases, where the process of digitalization reveals unethical activities and ideas hidden in the well-established, 'analog' context. Drawing from the examples, we introduce the Systematic Ethical Reflection (SER) model, a three-dimension model that can guide systematic reflections and rational discourse about ethical issues in digitalization initiatives. We discuss the SER model's merits as a practical theory -i.e., its usefulness to facilitate discussions about ethical issues in various phases of digitalization initiatives. Such discussions are imperative from a discourse ethical standpoint.
... In the early 1940s MIT professor Norbert Wiener during World War Two, a antiaircraft cannon tracking system involving a feedback (nervous) system [11]. In the mid-1960s, Donn Parker began to notice and study unethical and illegal activities of computer professionals. ...
This paper aims to advance the research on Software engineering ethics and rise the community's awareness about the importance of software ethics on their lives by examining student's perceptions on the impact of this filed on society's safety and welfare. Primary data based on 138 respondents were analyzed to investigate the relationship between student's awareness about the importance of software engineering code of ethics, and many factors including their academic stage, major, etc. Statistical techniques like Spearman correlations, and Mann Whitney were used to analyze data. The study shows that there is a significant relationship between undergraduate students who haven't taken ethics course and their knowledge about IEEE/ACM software engineering code of ethics. Likewise, there is a significant relationship between students who haven't taken ethics course and their opinion about supporting to the requirement of software engineering professional licensing. Regrading Postgraduates, our findings show that there is a significant relationship between student's of major software engineering and their knowledge about IEEE/ACM software engineering code of ethics. Likewise, there is a significant relationship between students of the 2nd year and their knowledge about code of ethics. On the contrary, the student's haven't taken ethics course are significantly higher with their perception about how large impact of software engineering practice on society's safety. What is striking that there is no significant relationship between postgraduate student's software engineering experience and non of the dependent variables. Our findings also show that there is a noticeable differences on students perceptions change after their awareness has been raised using the lecture material. This study attempted to present new insights on the importance and impact of software engineering code of ethics, by highlighting on different vital aspects that need more attention from decision makers in the education and labor sectors.
... Table 1 summarizes the resulting classification of ethical issues that are being currently discussed in ISR. The "abstract concepts" dimension sums up the research considering definition of basic ethical principles [4,[11][12][13][14][15]; description of basic concepts [16][17][18][19][20]; consideration of (particular) human values including their instances, e.g. the value of realizing an ability is operationalized via technology, e.g. [21][22][23]; (particular) human rights, e.g. ...
Information Technology (IT) creates changes in business and society affecting social and technological interactions as well as expectations towards technologies. Hence, our society starts demanding transparency and autonomy in the way IT artefacts are designed, used, applied and integrated in the everyday life. Following this appeal many institutions, companies and research facilities create principles for socially beneficial IT artifacts that address the actual needs, open new research directions as well as expose new business opportunities. This research in progress initiates a classification of the ethical issues mentioned and discussed in Information Systems Research (ISR). By doing so, social and moral values become visible and actionable to the design and development of new artifacts. The result facilitates a more pronounced understanding and grouping of ethical issues in IT in general and indicates research gaps for ISR in particular.
... Another key feature of PI is Floridi's continuing attentiveness to the ethical questions concerning information. Although the term "information ethics" has been used within both philosophical [13] and professional [14,15] practice since Norbert Weiner's seminal work on "computer ethics" [16,17], Floridi's development of information ethics (IE) has broadened the scope of discourse to an almost universal macro-ethics centered on information [18]. Fundamental to Floridi's argument is the notion that all entities, even those that do not qualify as "information organisms" as such (that is, as agents, living or not, capable of processing information in some way), do possess a minimal informational value as "information objects" (that is, as entities, living or not, capable of being processed as information in some way) that qualify them as "moral patients" worthy of some measure of respect. ...
The information ethics of Luciano Floridi's well-known Philosophy of Information (PI) project are explored as potential foundations for a deepening sense of stewardship in library and information studies (LIS) practice. The implications of PI's world view of ''information objects'' as having intrinsic value and resulting moral rights within the evolving ''infosphere'' are discussed in the context of current professional standards for collection management and preservation. Richard Fyffe's recent critical reconstruction of Floridi's concept of ''ontic trust'' as it might apply to librarianship as stewardship of the semantic environment is extended to better ground Floridi's conceptualization of the ''infosphere'' itself.
... The term "computer ethics" can be traced back to the 1970s [Bynum 2008b] but ethical concerns arising from digital computing go back to the very beginning of the development of the technology [Wiener 1954;Wiener 1964;Bynum 2008a]. Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics and one of the pivotal figures in the development of digital computers, recognized early that this technology had the potential to change many aspects of life that had crucial ethical importance. ...
Computing technologies and artifacts are increasingly integrated into most aspects of our professional, social, and private lives. One consequence of this growing ubiquity of computing is that it can have significant ethical implications that computing professionals need to be aware of. The relationship between ethics and computing has long been discussed. However, this is the first comprehensive survey of the mainstream academic literature of the topic. Based on a detailed qualitative analysis of the literature, the article discusses ethical issues, technologies that they are related to, and ethical theories, as well as the methodologies that the literature employs, its academic contribution, and resulting recommendations. The article discusses general trends and argues that the time has come for a transition to responsible research and innovation to ensure that ethical reflection of computing has practical and manifest consequences.
... The electronic computer in the 1940s, the Internet in the 1960s, and the World Wide Web in the 1990s -in short, the Information Age and its information and computing technologies -have given rise to the field of 'computer ethics' (Cavalier, 2005, p. 1). The foundations for 'computer ethics' trade back to 'cybernetics', the information theory that was developed by Norbert Wiener in the 1940s (for thorough analysis, see Bynum, 2004; 2008). In the 1940s and 1950s, Wiener examined the social and ethical consequences of information and communication technology and analyzed how they might affect fundamental human values (Bynum, 2005, p. 12). ...
This article conjoins a foundation in moral philosophy with an empirical study on the un/acceptability of moral practices in 'Second Life' SL. SL-residents were asked to rank morally charged SL-scenarios in a classification from 'most unacceptable' to 'most acceptable' and, while doing so, to reason out loud about their ranking. The analysis presented here focuses on their converging and diverging arguments. Regarding converging arguments, there was consensus on the unacceptability of six scenarios. Research participants believed these scenarios transcend the merely virtual and they subsequently grounded their argumentation in actual principles. They further agreed upon seven scenarios as acceptable; these scenarios were considered as typical features of SL and subsequently were not morally problematized. Regarding other scenarios, no consensus was reached. The author discusses these findings in terms of their ethical implications and in light of current approaches in the field of 'computer ethics'.
... Western philosophers have been concerned with ethical implications of ICT since the 1960s (cf. Moor, 1985, Bynum, 2008. Primarily, the discussion has taken place in the West and focused on Western conditions. ...
doctrine of double effect (DDE);principle of reasoning in ethics;killing in applied ethics;medical cases;medical ethics
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve, the quest to develop quantum, sentient, and conscious AI systems presents profound philosophical and ethical challenges. Two compelling paradigms—Panpsychic Consciousness and Imago Dei—offer distinct frameworks for guiding the development of these advanced AI systems. Panpsychism posits that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of reality, suggesting that AI could embody a universal, interconnected awareness. In contrast, the Imago Dei paradigm is rooted in the theological concept that humans are created in the image of God, emphasizing AI that reflects divine attributes such as wisdom, compassion, and moral integrity. This paper explores the theoretical underpinnings, practical applications, and ethical implications of both paradigms, providing a comparative analysis to inform the future development of AI. By examining these approaches, we aim to highlight how integrating philosophical and theological perspectives can lead to more ethical, empathetic, and meaningful AI systems that enhance human well-being and promote ecological sustainability.
Keywords: AI development, quantum AI, sentient AI, conscious AI, panpsychism, Imago Dei, ethical AI, AI ethics, philosophical AI, theological AI, universal consciousness, human-centric AI, ecological sustainability, moral integrity, divine attributes, empathetic AI, interconnectedness, human dignity, sustainable technology.
Considering ethical values, maintaining ethical requirements, and addressing ethical concerns is a crucial aspect of developing systems based on artificial intelligence (AI). Developers need to prioritize ethical considerations throughout the development process, from the initial concept to the final implementation. Despite the issuance of numerous ethical guidelines for technology developers in recent years, research results have shown no significant impact of ethical requirements on the human decision-making of software engineers from the tech community. It is therefore important to have well-defined processes to ensure that ethical standards are maintained throughout the development process. This is essential to fostering trust in AI-based systems and reducing their potential risks and negative impacts. This paper provides an overview of the processes that can integrate ethics into development methodologies by introducing a certification program that focuses on ethical accountability, transparency, privacy, and the avoidance of unacceptable algorithmic bias. The certification method specifies detailed criteria for the independent evaluation, conformity assessment, and certification of AI systems. The article also underlines factors that can affect ethical accountability, transparency, privacy, and unacceptable bias. It provides examples of the necessary documented evidence for conformity assessment against the suite of certification criteria that enable evaluation of the organizations’ ability to meet ethical requirements.
This chapter critically explores how sustainable business development and artificial intelligence (AI) converge, examining their synergy, opportunities, and ethical challenges. It highlights the parallel growth of sustainable business and AI's impact on consumer behavior, emphasizing the crucial need to adeptly manage AI's functions and ethics in corporate solutions. It delves into diverse ethical frameworks and explores their guidance for integrating AI responsibly, aiming for sustainability and broader societal welfare. Additionally, it delves into Confucian ethics, organizational psychology, and leadership principles, uncovering human potential in the AI era. It advocates merging philosophy, psychology, and sustainable business practices to foster ethically sound and psychologically attuned AI systems for corporate use.
This paper provides a systematic review of the transfer and quantification of the concept of entropy in multidisciplinary fields and delves into its future applications and research directions in organizational management psychology based on its core characteristics. We first comprehensively reviewed the conceptual evolution of entropy in disciplines such as physics, information theory, and psychology, revealing its complexity and diversity as an interdisciplinary concept. Subsequently, we analyzed the quantification methods of entropy in a multidisciplinary context and pointed out that their calculation methods have both specificity and commonality across different disciplines. Subsequently, the paper reviewed the research on how individuals cope with uncertainty in entropy increase, redefined psychological entropy from the perspective of organizational management psychology, and proposed an “entropy-based proactive control model” at the individual level. This model is built around the core connotation of entropy, covering four dimensions: learning orientation, goal orientation, change orientation, and risk taking. We believe that psychological entropy, as a meta structure of individuals, can simulate, explain, and predict the process of how individuals manage and control “entropy” in an organizational environment from a dynamic perspective. This understanding enables psychological entropy to integrate a series of positive psychological constructs (e.g., lean spirit), providing extensive predictive and explanatory power for various behaviors of individuals in organizations. This paper provides a new direction for the application of the concept of entropy in psychology, especially for theoretical development and practical application in the field of organizational management.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore an emerging ethical theory for the Digital Age – Flourishing Ethics – which will likely be applicable in many different cultures worldwide, addressing not only human concerns but also activities, decisions and consequences of robots, cyborgs, artificially intelligent agents and other new digital technologies.
Design/methodology/approach
In the past, a number of influential ethical theories in Western philosophy have focused upon choice and autonomy, or pleasure and pain or fairness and justice. These are important ethical concepts, but we consider “flourishing” to be a broader “umbrella concept” under which all of the above ideas can be included, plus additional ethical ideas from cultures in other regions of the world (for example, Buddhist, Muslim, Confucianist cultures and others). Before explaining the applied approach, this study discusses relevant ideas of four example thinkers who emphasize flourishing in their ethics writings: Aristotle, Norbert Wiener, James Moor and Simon Rogerson.
Findings
Flourishing Ethics is not a single ethical theory. It is “an approach,” a “family” of similar ethical theories which can be successfully applied to humans in many different cultures, as well as to non-human agents arising from new digital technologies.
Originality/value
This appears to be the first extended analysis of the emerging flourishing ethics “family” of theories.
The main aim of the research was to explore growth strategies that can BMS implement in emerging economies to embrace new banking innovations. This study applied mixed research methodology in form of formal and informal interviews. The study targeted BMS management responsible for strategy formulation and implementation as the main objective was to determine the appropriate strategies they must use to achieve their business objective of growing. For the purpose of studying the customer sample, area sampling was used to demarcate 2 different geographical areas within the population in Zimbabwe. The 5 areas were selected based on being representatives of 2 different provinces and the convenience to the researcher. Therefore, a sample of 40 was drawn from 8 banks chosen at random and accessible as at the time of conducting the research. Skip, Branching and Ranking questions were also administered via the questionnaire to help the respondents to quickly respond appropriately without being confused by what the exactly the questions required. The questionnaire used a mixture of open-ended and closed questions. Closed questions ensured that the actual information being sought could be obtained and therefore provided the respondents on how to answer them. The study uncovered that the ATM is still very much the most popular innovation in Zimbabwe, where the economy is still very much cash-based. Mobile banking is also very popular with most people now accessing banking services via their mobile phones and a significant proportion still taking up the service. BMS is facing challenges in achieving its growth as the findings have shown. BMS’ major competitors are Necor, Newtech, Proxy, Technet, Specialized Systems, EEC and Systems technologies, all sharing a total market share of 79%. The growth strategies for BMS are not effective as they are not well-thought out for the market they are operating in. If the goal is to grow, then BMS should plan and implement plans that are consistent with growth strategies.
Bu araştırmada ortaokul öğrencileri ile meslek lisesi öğrencilerinin bilişim etiği düzeylerini ortaya koymak ve karşılaştırmak, bu düzeylerinin cinsiyetlerine ve bulundukları öğrenme kademelerine göre değişimini incelemek amaçlanmıştır. Araştırmada genel tarama modellerinden biri olan ilişkisel tarama modelinden yararlanılmıştır. Araştırmanın örneklemi; İzmir ilinde öğrenim gören 101 ortaokul öğrencisi ile 179 meslek lisesi öğrencisi olmak üzere toplam 280 öğrenciden oluşmaktadır Çalışmanın verileri, Arıkan ve Duymaz (2014) tarafından Türkçe'ye uyarlanan “Gerçek Yaşam Durum Senaryolarıyla Bilişim Etiği (GYDSBE)” ölçeği kullanılarak toplanmıştır. 68 maddelik ölçeğin lise öğrencilere uygunluğunu belirlemek amacıyla araştırmacılar tarafından geçerlik güvenirlik çalışması yapılmıştır. Ölçek, “Google Formlar” üzerine aktarılarak çevrimiçi ortamda öğrencilere uygulanmıştır. Kolmogorov Smirnov testi kullanılarak araştırmada elde edilen verilerin normal dağılıma uygunluğu incelenmiştir. Bu testten elde edilen sonuçlara göre analizlerde ilişkisiz t-testi, frekans ve yüzdelerden faydalanılmıştır. Elde edilen bulgulara göre, öğrencilerin mahremiyet, ifade özgürlüğü ve fikri mülkiyet konularındaki etik bilgilerinin düşük düzeyde, doğruluk konusuna yönelik etik bilgilerinin ise orta düzeyde olduğu, ortaokul öğrencileri ile meslek lisesi öğrencilerinin bilişim etiği düzeylerinin ise farklılaşmadığı görülmüştür. Araştırmada elde edilen bir diğer sonuç ise, öğrencilerin bilişim etiği düzeylerinin cinsiyetlerine göre farklılaştığı ve bu farklılığın erkek öğrenciler lehine olduğu şeklindedir. Elde edilen sonuçlar hem ortaokul öğrencilerine hem de meslek lisesi öğrencilerine verilen bilgisayar derslerinin içeriklerinin bilişim etiği konusunda öğrencilere yeterince fayda sağlayamadığını, bu derslerin içeriklerinde bilişim etiği gibi önemli bir konuya yönelik iyileştirmelere gereksinim duyulduğunu ortaya koymaktadır.
This chapter addresses the competing interests of privacy versus public access to information. The chapter explores the collective and individual value of privacy and public access in a manner that considers information at the macrosocial and macroethical level. By using Sweden as a case study, we exemplify the classic and irresolvable tension between issues of information availability and confidentiality, integrity, and privacy. Given that privacy and public access interests will constantly need to be rebalanced, we present the views of government officials due to their unique role in implementing this balance. We conclude with an analysis of the reasonableness of this conduct.
This article conjoins a foundation in moral philosophy with an empirical study on the un/acceptability of moral practices in ‘Second Life’ (SL). SL-residents were asked to rank morally charged SL-scenarios in a classification from ‘(most) unacceptable’ to ‘(most) acceptable’ and, while doing so, to reason out loud about their ranking. The analysis presented here focuses on their converging and diverging arguments. Regarding converging arguments, there was consensus on the unacceptability of six scenarios. Research participants believed these scenarios transcend the merely virtual and they subsequently grounded their argumentation in actual principles. They further agreed upon seven scenarios as acceptable; these scenarios were considered as typical features of SL and subsequently were not morally problematized. Regarding other scenarios, no consensus was reached. The author discusses these findings in terms of their ethical implications and in light of current approaches in the field of ‘computer ethics’.
“Cyberbeing” is the interpretation of all beings in terms of information processing, along with our everyday experience of immersion in a world that revolves around such processing. This essay draws on Heidegger to critique both aspects of cyberbeing. Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics aspired to grasp humanity, society, life, machines, and the cosmos in terms of information, but Heidegger viewed cybernetic metaphysics as a form of the modern “humanist” project of representation and calculation, which misunderstands the human condition. This criticism is relevant to twenty-first century conceptions such as the information philosophy of Luciano Floridi. Heidegger’s thought can also illuminate cyberbeing as experience, because his account of inauthenticity in Being and Time can be applied to prevalent uses of information technology today. The technology does not create inauthenticity, but it tempts us into behavior that illustrates Heidegger’s concepts of curiosity, ambiguity, and idle talk, as well as inauthentic forms of spatiality and temporality. In conclusion, the essay considers the prospects for distancing ourselves from cyberbeing.
This chapter outlines the main developments of roboethics 9 years after a worldwide debate on the subject – that is, the applied ethics about ethical, legal, and societal aspects of robotics – opened up. Today, roboethics not only counts several thousands of voices on the Web, but is the issue of important literature relating to almost all robotics applications, and of hundreds of rich projects, workshops, and conferences. This increasing interest and sometimes even fierce debate expresses the perception and need of scientists, manufacturers, and users of professional guidelines and ethical indications about robotics in society.
Some of the issues presented in the chapter are well known to engineers, and less known or unknown to scholars of humanities, and vice versa. However, because the subject is transversal to many disciplines, complex, articulated, and often misrepresented, some of the fundamental concepts relating to ethics in science and technology are recalled and clarified.
A detailed taxonomy of sensitive areas is presented. It is based on a study of several years and referred to by scientists and scholars, the result of which is the Euron Roboethics Roadmap. This taxonomy identifies the most evident/urgent/sensitive ethical problems in the main applicative fields of robotics, leaving more in-depth research to further studies.
Internet engineering and networked systems research improves our understanding of the underlying technical processes of the Internet. Internet engineers therefore analyse data transfers on the Internet, typically by collecting data from devices of large groups of individuals as well as organisations. The designs of Internet engineering and research projects reflect human decisions and therefore may create new moral systems. This interplay of technology and society creates new practices that can impact the lives of individuals in many ways. These actions can raise new ethical dilemmas, or challenge existing ethics methodologies within the new and complex information environment presented by the Internet.
To further the discussion on Internet research and engineering ethics, the Ethics in Networked System Research (“ESRN”) project hosted a workshop at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, on 13 March 2015. The aim of the workshop was to understand how different disciplines involved in Internet research approach ethical dilemmas and justify their reasoning. To this end, a group of 25 researchers and practitioners from two distinct groups of researchers attended the workshop: (1) Computer scientists, network engineers and other technical researchers who have faced ethical and legal dilemmas in their work, and (2) philosophers, practical ethicists, legal philosophers, and related disciplines who are interested in Internet engineering and the ethical dilemmas posed by the Internet, but may not be aware of the details, subtleties, and dilemmas of the field. Several computer scientists gave short presentations about their projects, which were then discussed in-depth by the workshop participants. The inter-disciplinary discussions led to some interesting confrontations of cross-disciplinary reasoning.
This is a perspectives paper, in which we present several of the cases discussed, as well as the reasoning applied by the different groups. The arguments made during the workshop reveal some underlying assumptions and values, which lead to some emerging themes that in turn uncover particular conceptual gaps between the disciplines. This paper is by no means intended to be a comprehensive overview of computer ethics or Internet research ethics, but merely an exploration of the themes that emerged during the workshop.
Computer ethics represented by computer ethics rules that must govern and regulate the relationship between all the groups benefiting from the computer and by maintaining the security and privacy of information through the three main parties; They are the beneficiaries, suppliers of telecommunications service providers and software suppliers. Party mediator between the three parties is the legislative and regulatory bodies. The last group must be established by all the countries, which include the experts in the field of information technology and communication as well as the legislator's laws. The countries need regulatory institutions, that responsible for monitoring and follow-up the rule and laws that govern the computer ethics, to maintain the privacy of individuals and institutions, especially after the application of e-government in most countries of the world, and increased use of electronic commerce. Internet Information faces many breakthroughs in order to steal information or fraud to steal money. This is in addition to the need to protect youth and adolescents of the ideas and ethics that are offensive to communities and be an agent for demolition instead of being the progress factor of the society. It is therefore essential teaching of the ethics of computer use in schools and universities, organize workshops or forums relay everything novice in this area, and the opening of specialized programs at universities to provide the society for specialists in this area, has been addressed in this research the concept of globalization and the ethics of the profession of computer and their impact on different aspects of life, through the steady increase in Internet users and increase e-commerce applications. This has been addressed also to the more computer applications annoy for Internet users and to the kinds of breakthroughs that face individuals and institutions. So it was proposing a set of principles that must be followed, including the need to establish a foundation organized sector use of information systems and the Internet on the level of each country, in addition to creating a global institution with a membership of all countries in the world to follow up and regulate the use of information systems and the Internet, in line with the legislation of these countries with respect for each nation of laws and legislation of other countries in the organization of sector use of information systems.
This introduction to Luciano Floridi’s philosophy of information (PI) provides a short overview of Floridi’s work and its reception by the library and information studies (LIS) community, brief definitions of some important PI concepts, and illustrations of Floridi’s three suggested applications of PI to library and information studies. It suggests that LIS may just be as important to PI as PI is to LIS in terms of deepening our mutual understanding of information ontologies, the dynamics of informational domains, and the variety of evolving relationships among information organisms and information objects.
A review of: Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto Jeroen van den Hoven and John Weckert (eds), Information Technology and Moral Philosophy Jeremy Malcolm, Multi-Stakeholder Governance and the Internet Governance Forum
Since 2003, the ethical, legal, and societal issues (ELS) in advanced robotics have attracted the increasing and lively interest of academic and professional circles. A similar, although more occasional, debate has also spread to the general public, stimulated either by the novel statements of researchers about recent advancement in robotics or by new and sensitive robotics applications. This increase of contributions and interest occurred hand in hand with the rapid development of research and applications in the service (personal) robot sector, marking the end of the robot segregation era [1].
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to address the place of computer/ICT ethics in the global ICT society driven by knowledge economy.
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper focuses on three main issues: the evolution of the name of the leading technology of our times and, accordingly, the evolution of the name of the society in which this technology plays the leading role; some ethical dilemmas that the global ICT society will need to solve; global ICT ethics and the knowledge economy.
Findings
– The paper suggests that global ICT ethics should be an ethics focusing on the dynamics of the relationship between the weak and the strong, the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick worldwide – and it should explore the ethical problems from the point of view of both parties involved. That way, Global ICT Ethics can have a truly communicative character, and it can become an ethics that will be both a co‐creator and also a result of a democratic processes.
Originality/value
– This paper should interest anyone concerned with ICT and globalization.
In the past, major scientific and technological revolutions, like the Copernican Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, have had profound effects, not only upon society in general, but also upon Philosophy. Today's Information Revolution is no exception. Already it has had significant impacts upon our understanding of human nature, the nature of society, even the nature of the universe. Given these developments, this essay considers some of the philosophical contributions of two “philosophers of the Information Age”—Norbert Wiener and Luciano Floridi—with regard to the nature of the universe, human nature, the nature of society, and the nature of “artificial agents” such as robots, softbots, and cyborgs.
This essay describes a new ethical theory that has begun to coalesce from the works of several scholars in the international computer ethics community. I call the new theory ‚Flourishing Ethics’ because of its Aristotelian roots, though it also includes ideas suggestive of Taoism and Buddhism. In spite of its roots in ancient ethical theories, Flourishing Ethics is informed and grounded by recent scientific insights into the nature of living things, human nature and the fundamental nature of the universe – ideas from today’s information theory, astrophysics and genetics. Flourishing Ethics can be divided conveniently into two parts. The first part, which I call ‚Human-Centered FE,’ is focused exclusively upon human beings – their actions, values and characters. The second part, which I call ‚General FE,’ applies to every physical entity in the universe, including humans. Rather than replacing traditional ‚great ethical theories,’ Flourishing Ethics is likely to deepen and broaden our understanding of them.
I heartily concur with the concern that Bynum and Rogerson express about the global impact of computing. The number and kinds of applications of computing increase dramatically each year and the impact of computing is felt around the planet. The ubiquitous use of electronic mail, electronic funds transfer, reservation systems, the world wide web, etc. places millions of the inhabitants of the planet in a global electronic village. Communication and actions at distance have never been easier. We are definitely in a computer revolution. We are beyond the introduction stage of the revolution in which computers are curiosities of limited power used only by a few. Now entire populations of developed countries are in the permeation stage of the revolution in which computers are rapidly moving to every aspect of
This article discusses the foresight of philosopher/mathematician Norbert Wiener who, in the 1940s, founded Information Ethics as a research discipline. Wiener envisioned the coming of an “automatic age” in which information technology would have profound social and ethical impacts upon the world. He predicted, for example, machines that will learn, reason and play games; “automatic factories” that will replace assembly-line workers and middle managers with computerized devices; workers who will perform their jobs over great distances with the aid of new communication technologies; and people who will gain remarkable powers by adding computerized “prostheses” to their bodies. To analyze the ethical implications of such developments, Wiener presented some principles of justice and employed a powerful practical method of ethical analysis.
The essential difficulty about Computer Ethics' (CE) philosophical status is a methodological problem: standard ethical theories cannot easily be adapted to deal with CE-problems, which appear to strain their conceptual resources, and CE requires a conceptual foundation as an ethical theory. Information Ethics (IE), the philosophical foundational counterpart of CE, can be seen as a particular case of environmental ethics or ethics of the infosphere. What is good for an information entity and the infosphere in general? This is the ethical question asked by IE. The answer is provided by a minimalist theory of deseerts: IE argues that there is something more elementary and fundamental than life and pain, namely being, understood as information, and entropy, and that any information entity is to be recognised as the centre of a minimal moral claim, which deserves recognition and should help to regulate the implementation of any information process involving it. IE can provide a valuable perspective from which to approach, with insight and adequate discernment, not only moral problems in CE, but also the whole range of conceptual and moral phenomena that form the ethical discourse.
The new and rapidly growing field of communication sciences owes as much to Norbert Wiener as to any one man. He coined the word for it—cybernetics. In God & Golem, Inc., the author concerned himself with major points in cybernetics which are relevant to religious issues.The first point he considers is that of the machine which learns. While learning is a property almost exclusively ascribed to the self-conscious living system, a computer now exists which not only can be programmed to play a game of checkers, but one which can "learn" from its past experience and improve on its own game. For a time, the machine was able to beat its inventor at checkers. "It did win," writes the author, "and it did learn to win; and the method of its learning was no different in principle from that of the human being who learns to play checkers.
A second point concerns machines which have the capacity to reproduce themselves. It is our commonly held belief that God made man in his own image. The propagation of the race may also be interpreted as a function in which one living being makes another in its own image. But the author demonstrates that man has made machines which are "very well able to make other machines in their own image," and these machine images are not merely pictorial representations but operative images. Can we then say: God is to Golem as man is to Machines? in Jewish legend, golem is an embryo Adam, shapeless and not fully created, hence a monster, an automation.The third point considered is that of the relation between man and machine. The concern here is ethical. "render unto man the things which are man's and unto the computer the things which are the computer's," warns the author. In this section of the book, Dr. Wiener considers systems involving elements of man and machine. The book is written for the intellectually alert public and does not involve any highly technical knowledge. It is based on lectures given at Yale, at the Société Philosophique de Royaumont, and elsewhere.
This essay provides a critique of mainstream computer ethics and argues for the importance of a complementary approach called disclosive computer ethics, which is concerned with the moral deciphering of embedded values and norms in computer systems, applications and practices. Also, four key values are proposed as starting points for disclosive studies in computer ethics: justice, autonomy, democracy and privacy. Finally, it is argued that research in disclosive computer ethics should be multi-level and interdisciplinary, distinguishing between a disclosure level, a theoretical level, and an an application level.
The author agrees with James Moor that computer technology, because it is ‘logically malleable’, is bringing about a genuine
social revolution. Moor compares the computer revolution to the ‘industrial revolution’ of the late 18th and the 19th centuries;
but it is argued here that a better comparison is with the ‘printing press revolution’ that occurred two centuries before
that. Just as the major ethical theories of Bentham and Kant were developed in response to the printing press revolution,
so a new ethical theory is likely to emerge from computer ethics in response to the computer revolution. The newly emerging
field of information ethics, therefore, is much more important than even its founders and advocates believe.
Theoretical results about black holes suggest that the universe could be like a gigantic hologram
From an analysis of actual cases, three categories of bias in computer systems have been developed: preexisting, technical, and emergent. Preexisting bias has its roots in social institutions, practices, and attitudes. Technical bias arises from technical constraints or considerations. Emergent bias arises in a context of use. Although others have pointed to bias in particular computer systems and have noted the general problem, we know of no comparable work that examines this phenomenon comprehensively and which offers a framework for understanding and remedying it. We conclude by suggesting that freedom from bias should be counted among the select set of criteria - including reliability, accuracy, and efficiency -according to which the quality of systems in use in society should be judged.
Computer ethics: Responsibility regained
- Gotterbarn
Review of L. Smolin, Three roads to quantum gravity
- Renteln