The Precautionary Principle in the Information Society

Som, Claudia; Hilty, Lorenz M.; Ruddy, Thomas F.

doi:10.1080/10807030490513801

Cited by 31 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…It is expected that any technology that is subject to significant uncertainty and has a potentially high impact on society will be handled cautiously, and intelligent systems surely fall into this category, where the precautionary principle applies (Hansson 1997(Hansson , 1999Montague 1998;Som et al 2004). Thus, responsibility for preventing harm and the burden of proof that it is not harmful is something that manufacturers of intelligent technology are responsible for.…”

Section: Regulatory Mechanisms In Safety Critical Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robots: ethical by design

Dodig-Crnković

Çürüklü

2011

Ethics Inf Technol

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Among ethicists and engineers within robotics there is an ongoing discussion as to whether ethical robots are possible or even desirable. We answer both of these questions in the positive, based on an extensive literature study of existing arguments. Our contribution consists in bringing together and reinterpreting pieces of information from a variety of sources. One of the conclusions drawn is that artifactual morality must come in degrees and depend on the level of agency, autonomy and intelligence of the machine. Moral concerns for agents such as intelligent search machines are relatively simple, while highly intelligent and autonomous artifacts with significant impact and complex modes of agency must be equipped with more advanced ethical capabilities. Systems like cognitive robots are being developed that are expected to become part of our everyday lives in future decades. Thus, it is necessary to ensure that their behaviour is adequate. In an analogy with artificial intelligence, which is the ability of a machine to perform activities that would require intelligence in humans, artificial morality is considered to be the ability of a machine to perform activities that would require morality in humans. The capacity for artificial (artifactual) morality, such as artifactual agency, artifactual responsibility, artificial intentions, artificial (synthetic) emotions, etc., come in varying degrees and depend on the type of agent. As an illustration, we address the assurance of safety in modern High Reliability Organizations through responsibility distribution. In the same way that the concept of agency is generalized in the case of artificial agents, the concept of moral agency, including responsibility, is generalized too. We propose to look at artificial moral agents as having functional responsibilities within a network of distributed responsibilities in a socio-technological system. This does not take away the responsibilities of the other stakeholders in the system, but facilitates an understanding and regulation of such networks. It should be pointed out that the process of development must assume an evolutionary form with a number of iterations because the emergent properties of artifacts must be tested in real world situations with agents of increasing intelligence and moral competence. We see this paper as a contribution to the macro-level Requirement Engineering through discussion and analysis of general requirements for design of ethical robots.

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Section: Regulatory Mechanisms In Safety Critical Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robots: ethical by design

Dodig-Crnković

Çürüklü

2011

Ethics Inf Technol

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“…According to the Precautionary Principle, we use an approach to risk assessment that is applicable before full empirical evidence is available. The study for TA-SWISS was one of the first attempts to apply the Precautionary Principle to a mass consumer technology (see also Som et al 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the Human, Social, and Environmental Risks of Pervasive Computing

Hilty

Som

2004

Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: An International Journal

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The vision of Pervasive Computing is built on the assumption that computers will become part of everyday objects, augmenting them with information services and enhanced functionality. This article reports on the approach we have used to assess potential side effects of this development on human health and the environment, and the major risks we identified. Social risks such as the risk of conflicts between users and non-users of the technology were also included because of their potential indirect adverse health effects. Assessing a technological vision before it has materialized makes it necessary to deal with two types of uncertainty: first, the uncertainty of how fast and to what extent the technology will be taken up and how it will be used; second, the uncertainty of causal models connecting technology-related causes with potential health or environmental effects. Due to these uncertainties, quantitative methods to evaluate expected risks are inadequate. Instead, we developed a "risk filter" that makes it possible to rank risks according to a set of qualitative criteria based on the Precautionary Principle. As the overall result, it turned out that Pervasive Computing bears potential risks to health, society, and/or the environment in the following fields: Non-ionizing radiation, stress imposed on the user, restriction of consumers' and patients' freedom of choice, threats to ecological sustainability, and dissipation of responsibility in computer-controlled environments.

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“…In other words, ICT has much potential for supporting sustainable development, although these potentials have not been sufficiently considered and exploited (Som et al, 2004;.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%