Abstract. The pervasive use of information and communication technology (ICT) in modern societies enables countless opportunities for individuals, institutions, businesses and scientists, but also raises difficult ethical and social problems. In particular, ICT helped to make societies more complex and thus harder to understand, which impedes social and political interventions to avoid harm and to increase the common good. To overcome this obstacle, the large-scale EU flagship proposal FuturICT intends to create a platform for accessing global human knowledge as a public good and instruments to increase our understanding of the information society by making use of ICT-based research. In this contribution, we outline the ethical justification for such an endeavor. We argue that the ethical issues raised by FuturICT research projects overlap substantially with many of the known ethical problems emerging from ICT use in general. By referring to the notion of Value Sensitive Design, we show for the example of privacy how this core value of responsible ICT can be protected in pursuing research in the framework of FuturICT. In addition, we discuss further ethical issues and outline the institutional design of FuturICT allowing to address them.
The Moral Case for FuturICTSocieties in the 21st century have reached a level of complexity that has made our understanding of them deeply problematic. Moreover, whatever provisionary understanding we manage to achieve is often outpaced by rapid change and new developments, making social and political interventions difficult. A major driving force of change is information and communication technology (ICT) that created new instruments for social exchange (e.g., social media, social network sites). Political decision makers, however, often have difficulties in keeping track of new media developments and in coming to grips with their dynamics and impact upon society and their varia e-mail: M.J.vandenHoven@tudelft.nl