FuturICT - The Road towards Ethical ICT

TL;DR

FuturICT aims to develop an ethical, ICT-based platform for understanding the information society, emphasizing responsible design and addressing social and ethical challenges of pervasive technology use.

Contribution

This paper presents the ethical framework and institutional design for FuturICT, integrating Value Sensitive Design to address privacy and other ethical issues in large-scale ICT research.

Findings

Ethical issues in FuturICT overlap with general ICT ethical problems.

Value Sensitive Design can protect core values like privacy.

Institutional structures are proposed to manage ethical concerns.

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.