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Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

In the medical literature, promising results regarding accuracy of medical AI are presented as claims for its potential to increase efficiency. This elision of concepts is misleading and incorrect. First, the promise that AI will reduce human workload rests on a too narrow assessment of what constitutes workload in the first place. Human operators need new skills and deal with new responsibilities, these systems need an elaborate infrastructure and support system that all contribute to an increased amount of human work and short-term efficiency wins may become sources of long-term inefficiency. Second, for the realization of increased efficiency, the human-side of technology implementation is determinate. Human knowledge, competencies and trust can foster or undermine efficiency. We conclude that is important to remain conscious and critical about how we talk about expected benefits of AI, especially when referring to systemic changes based on single studies., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

The present chapter begins by exploring whether the project of a hermeneutic technology assessment (TA) squares well with some of TA's most fundamental presuppositions and commitments including, for instance, to provide assessments that are relevant for policymakers and can guide the shaping of emerging technologies in a responsible manner. If – as will be shown – the hermeneutic idea can be coherently established within TA, we must ask what does an understanding of emerging technologies in their guise as futuristic narratives entail? Which questions do we have to ask, to gain a better understanding of future technologies in their manifold present representations? The present chapter approaches these questions by examining the cases of nanotechnology and “Slaughterbots.” This will result in a demarcation of various dimensions and a list of questions about the origins and guise of those narratives that can be posed at other narratives of this sort. Taken together, this chapter makes some major steps towards a toolkit for applying the hermeneutic research lens to various socio-technical visions and narratives., Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Martin Sand and Luca Chiapperino find in the concept of serendipity a versatile umbrella term to reassess their previous work on moral luck and collective responsibility. Moral luck supposedly occurs when someone receives praise or blame for things beyond control. Given the ubiquity of luck, this seems to be a seriously disquieting aspect of ordinary morality. The rewards and recognition for serendipitous discoveries fall into exactly this category. That is: more than the intentions, actions, and characters of scientists matters for discoveries to obtain, just as in cases of moral luck, something beyond morality affects our moral judgments. Even if a theoretical way of resolving the conceptual ambiguities that underlie this debate were found, there remain practical questions of how to perform stratification in science and innovation in ways that both hinge on, and yet refrain from, considerations of desert and achievement. With the example of Edward Jenner’s luck- and serendipity-infused discovery of vaccination, the authors attempt to better understand the intricate value trade-offs that underlie stratification policies in science, which have to be constantly re-negotiated to maintain their legitimacy. Thereby, Sand and Ciapperino aim to strike a bold step towards understanding the ethics of serendipity., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

After years of missing the agreed upon goals for carbon reduction, we might conclude that global climate policies set infeasible standards to halt climate change. The widespread non-compliance of many signees with frameworks such as the Paris Agreement indicates that these frameworks were too optimistic regarding the signees’ motivation to act. One of the suggested ways out of this impasse, is geoengineering, which is seen as a “techno-fix” of the non-compliance problem, relieving signees and other actors of some, or most, of their mitigation duties. This paper scrutinizes different approaches towards climate mitigation that focus on behavioral change or on technological solutions. We argue that these different approaches do not originate from categorically different theories of climate justice. Indeed, seemingly realistic and seemingly idealistic proposals do not disagree on the substance of climate justice, but about what is to be considered feasible. Furthermore, by applying this dialectic lens on ideal vs. non-ideal theorizing in the context of climate justice, we show that (backward-looking) residual responsibility is an overlooked aspect of geoengineering as a (forward-looking) non-ideal approach to achieve climate justice. We will outline three possible consequences of this moral residue: 1) Residual responsibility can provide grounds to demand compensation, 2) it can constitute other forward-looking responsibilities (e.g., the maintenance of geoengineering technologies) and 3) it provides a reason to employ other techno-fixes equal in effectiveness and risks that do not sidestep the problem of non-compliance., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Der vorliegende Aufsatz geht zwei Fragen nach: Sind digitale Utopien „echte Utopien“? Und, was ist der Wert solcher Narrative? Diese Fragen sind von besonderer Signifikanz: Anlehnend an klassische Argumente in der politischen Philosophie stehen digitalen Utopien in der Kritik. Wie politische Utopien, die häufig als unrealisierbar gelten, lenkten auch digitale Utopien von Wichtigerem ab und schürten Hoffnungen, die unerfüllt bleiben müssen. Träfe dies zu, wären digitale Utopien gefährlich und man müsse Abstand halten. Aber was ist deren Wert? Einem vernünftigen Begriff von „Utopie“ folgend, lässt sich diese Frage in drei Teilfragen untergliedern: Stellen sie einen wünschenswerten Zustand dar, sind sie realisierbar und stellen sie eine Kritik der vorherrschenden Gesellschaftsordnung vor? Insbesondere letzterer Aspekt lohnt sich genauerer Prüfung. Dazu werden wir uns zwei paradigmatische, digitale Utopien ansehen: Digitalisierte Medizin und den Transhumanismus. Jüngere Argumente in der politischen Philosophie suggerieren, dass es intrinsisch wertvoll ist, ein besseres Verständnis von einer idealen Gesellschaft zu haben. Ginge es in digitalen Utopien also ebenfalls um die ideale Gesellschaft, träfe das Argument des intrinsischen Wertes auch auf digitale Utopien zu., Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Values Technology and Innovation, Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

A tighter integration of modeling frameworks for climate and air quality is urgently needed to assess the impacts of clean air policies on future Arctic and global climate. We combined a new model emulator and comprehensive emissions scenarios for air pollutants and greenhouse gases to assess climate and human health co-benefits of emissions reductions. Fossil fuel use is projected to rapidly decline in an increasingly sustainable world, resulting in far-reaching air quality benefits. Despite human health benefits, reductions in sulfur emissions in a more sustainable world could enhance Arctic warming by 0.8 °C in 2050 relative to the 1995–2014, thereby offsetting climate benefits of greenhouse gas reductions. Targeted and technically feasible emissions reduction opportunities exist for achieving simultaneous climate and human health co-benefits. It would be particularly beneficial to unlock a newly identified mitigation potential for carbon particulate matter, yielding Arctic climate benefits equivalent to those from carbon dioxide reductions by 2050.

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Medical AI is increasingly being developed and tested to improve medical diagnosis, prediction and treatment of a wide array of medical conditions. Despite worries about the explainability and accuracy of such medical AI systems, it is reasonable to assume that they will be increasingly implemented in medical practice. Current ethical debates focus mainly on design requirements and suggest embedding certain values such as transparency, fairness, and explainability in the design of medical AI systems. Aside from concerns about their design, medical AI systems also raise questions with regard to physicians' responsibilities once these technologies are being implemented and used. How do physicians’ responsibilities change with the implementation of medical AI? Which set of competencies do physicians have to learn to responsibly interact with medical AI? In the present article, we will introduce the notion of forward-looking responsibility and enumerate through this conceptual lens a number of competencies and duties that physicians ought to employ to responsibly utilize medical AI in practice. Those include amongst others understanding the range of reasonable outputs, being aware of own experience and skill decline, and monitoring potential accuracy decline of the AI systems., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Values Technology and Innovation, Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Governments and companies are increasingly promoting and organizing Responsible Innovation. It is, however, unclear how the seemingly incompatible demands for responsibility, which is associated with care and caution, can be harmonized with demands for innovation, which is associated with risk-taking and speed. We turn to the tradition of virtue ethics and argue that it can be a strong accomplice to Responsible Innovation by focussing on the agential side of innovation. Virtue ethics offers an adequate response to the epistemic and moral complexity in innovation and encourages moral behaviour. We enumerate a number of virtues that people involved in Responsible Innovation would need to cultivate both related to responsibility, such as justice, anticipation, civility and inclusion, and virtues related to innovation, such as courage, dedication, curiosity and creativity. We put forward practical wisdom (phronesis) as a key virtue to regulate relevant virtues and to deal with the tension between responsibility and innovation. Practical wisdom helps an agent to find an appropriate mean in exercising and expressing the other virtues—where the mean is relative to the specific context of action and the role and abilities of the agent., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

BACKGROUND: Primary prevention has the potential to modify the course of depression, but the consistency and magnitude of this effect are currently undetermined. METHODS: PRISMA and RIGHT compliant (PROSPERO:CRD42020179659) systematic meta-review, PubMed/Web of Science, up to June 2020. Meta-analyses of controlled interventions for the primary prevention of depressive symptoms [effect measures: standardized mean difference (SMD)] or depressive disorders [effect measure: relative risk (RR)] were carried out. Results were stratified by: (i) age range; (ii) target population (general and/or at-risk); (iii) intervention type. Quality (assessed with AMSTAR/AMSTAR-PLUS content) and credibility (graded as high/moderate/low) were assessed. USPSTF grading system was used for recommendations. RESULTS: Forty-six meta-analyses (k=928 individual studies, n=286,429 individuals, mean age=22.4 years, 81.1% female) were included. Effect sizes were: SMD=0.08-0.53; for depressive symptoms; RR=0.90-0.28 for depressive disorders. Sensitivity analyses including only RCTs did not impact the findings. AMSTAR median=9 (IQR=8-9); AMSTAR-PLUS content median=4.25 (IQR=4-5). Credibility of the evidence was insufficient/low in 43 (93.5%) meta-analyses, moderate in two (4.3%), and high in one (2.2%): reduction of depressive symptoms using psychosocial interventions for young adults only, and a combination of psychological and educational interventions in primary care had moderate credibility; preventive administration of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) for depressive disorders in individuals with a stroke had high credibility. LIMITATIONS: Intervention heterogeneity and lack of long-term efficacy evaluation. CONCLUSIONS: Primary preventive interventions for depression might be effective. Among them, clinicians may offer SSRIs post-stroke to prevent depressive disorders, and psychosocial interventions for children/adolescents/young adults with risk factors or during the prenatal/pe

From the early days of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), luck has played the role of an antagonist to responsibility: responsible innovation is, in part, an effort to control for the possible negative effects of luck–the chance that chance itself will take our technologies in directions that we would rather avoid. If we are to have innovations that are socially desirable and ethically acceptable, it seems, we must prevent bad luck by controlling for uncertainty wherever we can. This control-based approach has, however, proven to be impossible, with consequences for the practice of research, for the institutions that fund and guide research directions, and for how we as a society conceive of the potential for responsible research to deal well with the uncertainties of our contemporary and future world. This special issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation tackles the relationship between responsibility and luck head on, with authors providing assessments and potential solutions for the problems that luck creates, for how researchers conceive of their own responsibilities, how institutions can be more responsible toward research itself, and how we can take luck up into our innovation practices in a productive way., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Scientific discoveries are often to some degree influenced by luck. Whether luck’s influence is at odds with common-sense intuitions about responsibility, is the central concern of the philosophical debate about moral luck. Do scientists acknowledge that luck plays a role in their work and–if so–do they consider it morally problematic? The present article discusses the results of four focus groups with scientists, who were asked about their views on luck in their fields and its moral implications. The participants underscored circumstantial luck as a key dimension of luck in science. Nevertheless, most participants insisted that there are ways of executing ‘control’ in science: They believe that virtues and skills can increase one’s chances for success. The cultivation of these skills and virtues was considered a reasonable ground for pride. Prizes and rewards were rarely tied to personal desert, but instead to their societal function., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

The nexus of the moral luck debate is the control principle, which says that people are responsible only for things within their control. In this paper, I will first argue that the control principle should be restrained to blameworthiness, because responsibility is too wide a concept to square with control. Many deniers of moral luck appeal to the intuitiveness of the control principle. Defenders of moral luck do not share this intuition and demand a stronger defence of the control principle. I will establish a defence of the control principle based on the value of simplicity for selecting a theory of blameworthiness. A simpler theory of blameworthiness is more likely to be true, and not being falsely judged blameworthy is desirable. I will conclude that simplicity advices the acceptance of the control principle over other theories of blameworthiness that embrace factors beyond control., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

A prominent view in contemporary philosophy of technology suggests that more technology implies more possibilities and, therefore, more responsibilities. Consequently, the question ‘What technology?’ is discussed primarily on the backdrop of assessing, assigning, and avoiding technology- borne culpability. The view is reminiscent of the Olympian gods’ vengeful and harsh reaction to Prometheus’ play with fire. However, the Olympian view leaves unexplained how technologies increase possibilities. Also, if Olympians are right, endorsing their view will at some point demand putting a halt to technological development, which is absurd. Hence, we defend an alternative perspective on the relationship between responsibility and technology: Our Promethean view recognises technology as the result of collective, forward-looking responsibility and not only as a cause thereof. Several examples illustrate that technologies are not always the right means to tackle human vulnerabilities. Together, these arguments prompt a change in focus from the question ‘What technology?’ to ‘Why technology?’, Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Background: Decreased number of T-regulatory cells (Tregs) and/or their loss of function potentially lead to uncontrolled immune-mediated inflammatory responses. There are only few data available on Tregs in hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) – a disease in which it has been suggested that host immune factors and an overactive immune system of the follicular epithelium play a pathogenetic role. Objectives: To analyse frequencies of Tregs subpopulations in blood of HS patients in comparison with a healthy control group. Materials & methods: Blood samples obtained from HS patients and healthy controls were evaluated by flow cytometry and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Results: The frequency of natural Tregs among CD4+ T lymphocytes were significantly reduced in the HS group compared to the healthy controls. The proportion of activated Tregs, non-suppressive Tregs and proliferating Tregs showed no significant difference when compared to controls. Regarding Tregs frequencies, there was no significant difference between the three Hurley stages. Serum concentrations of IL-10, TGF-ß1 and IL-17A did not show significant differences between the HS and control group. Conclusion: The reduction of natural Tregs observed in blood of HS patients could be the result of Tregs homing to sites of inflammatory hot spots in HS skin. Further studies are justified evaluating the role of circulating Tregs during the evolution of HS lesions and as a biomarker for treatment response.