Abstract In this essay, a new approach for the ethical study of emerging technology ethics will be presented, called anticipatory technology ethics (ATE). The ethics of emerging technology is the study of ethical issues at the R&D and introduction stage of technology development through anticipation of possible future devices, applications, and social consequences. I will argue that a major problem for its development is the problem of uncertainty, which can only be overcome through methodologically sound forecasting and futures studies. I (...) will then consider three contemporary approaches to the ethics of emerging technologies that use forecasting: ethical technology assessment, the techno-ethical scenarios approach and the ETICA approach, and I considered their strengths and weaknesses. Based on this critical study, I then present my own approach: ATE. ATE is a conceptually and methodologically rich approach for the ethical analysis of emerging technologies that incorporates a large variety of ethical principles, issues, objects and levels of analysis, and research aims. It is ready to be applied to contemporary and future emerging technologies. Content Type Journal Article Category Original Paper Pages 1-13 DOI 10.1007/s11569-012-0141-7 Authors Philip A. E. Brey, Department of Philosophy, School of Behavioral Sciences, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands Journal NanoEthics Online ISSN 1871-4765 Print ISSN 1871-4757. (shrink)

Social robotics is a cutting edge research area gathering researchers and stakeholders from various disciplines and organizations. The transformational potential that these machines, in the form of, for example, caregiving, entertainment or partner robots, pose to our societies and to us as individuals seems to be limited by our technical limitations and phantasy alone. This collection contributes to the field of social robotics by exploring its boundaries from a philosophically informed standpoint. It constructively outlines central potentials and challenges and thereby (...) also provides a stable fundament for further research of empirical, qualitative or methodological nature. (shrink)

[1]Though emerging from different venues and backgrounds, risk management and digital applications are both based on sophisticated techniques of representation. This paper tracks the multiple overlappings and convergence between these two streams of representations. Initially digital technologies play a background role, as a tool to execute the algorithms of risk calculus. Then, they are useful in managing surveys and data analysis for those areas where risk management needs to store data on, for example, accidents. With the extension of markets for (...) trading risk, computers and networks (or Information and Communication Technologies, ICT) become the tools of choice to allow the efficient functioning of industries like insurance. In other industries, like banking, where the business is a vast archipelago of applications running on systems and networks, it is apparent that these integrated systems are inherently exposed to risk. Hence, these humble tools become both the infrastructure of the risk industry, and also the source of new, often incalculable risks; they move from a clear-cut subordinate relationship (as tool) to that of imbrication. Risk representations become more calculable and formalized, but this is obtained at the price of an incalculability of the risks of the infrastructure itself. The analysis of the multiple patterns of imbrication of representations between risk and digital technologies is applied to a range of empirical domains: from software engineering and information systems (the subservient infrastructure); to operational risk in banking; and finally to the future scenario of the democratization of finance, whereby Global Risk Information Databases (GRIDs), become gigantic machines to represent, compute, and trade all sorts of individual and social risks. Overall, the paper seeks to characterize the multiple links between risk and digital technologies in organizations and draws in part on the phenomenology of representation and Heidegger`s studies of Care and Concern and his later work on the essence of modern technology.[1]. (shrink)