Date: Tuesday 22 August 2023
Time: 12:00 BST
Duration: 45 min session + 15 min of questions and answers.
Session overview:
Smart information systems (SIS) are systems that incorporate artificial intelligence techniques – in particular, machine learning and big data analytics. These raise significant hopes: for example, to better understand and cure diseases, but also to revolutionise transport, to optimise business processes or reduce carbon emissions. At the same time, they raise many ethical and social concerns, ranging from worries about biases and resulting discrimination to the distribution of socio-economic and political power and their impact on democracy.
Drawing on the findings of the SHERPA project (www.project-sherpa.eu), the presentation suggests that one perspective to better understand these systems and their social and ethical consequences is to use the metaphor of an ecosystem to describe them, a metaphor already widely used in the policy discourse on AI.
The talk analyses what the use of the ecosystem metaphor means for the evaluation of ethical issues of smart information systems, which conclusions can be drawn from it and how these can inform recommendations for policymakers and other stakeholders.
The presentation is based on the material developed in a book, which is freely available from:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-69978-9
Speaker: Bernd Carsten Stahl
Designation: Professor of Critical Research in Technology, part of the School of Computer Science
Affiliation: University of Nottingham, UK
Bernd Carsten Stahl is Professor of Critical Research in Technology at the School of Computer Science of the University of Nottingham. His interests cover philosophical issues arising from the intersections of business, technology, and information. This includes ethical questions of current and emerging of ICTs, critical approaches to information systems and issues related to responsible research and innovation.
The slides are available here; and the recording is available below: