AUTHOR
Agustin A. Araya

ABSTRACT

Ubiquitous Computing has been proposed as a long term strategy for the penetration of everyday life as a whole with computing technology. It proposes a new way of integrating communications and computer technologies beyond the paradigm of the unembedded computer in a way conducive to the pervasive penetration of everyday activities.

Several key principles underlie the proposals for Ubiquitous Computing. First, as its name indicates, Ubiquitous Computing aims at achieving “maximal ubiquity.” Such principle, responsible for the surprising character of this technology, calls for the penetration of “everything” with computing technology. Computers “will be embedded in walls, chairs, clothing, light switches, cars – in everything.” Second, such ubiquity would make it possible the real-time dissemination of information “from everywhere to everywhere.” This principle, which we call the ultra-disseminability of information, by making information available everywhere it would enable the development of a variety of innovative applications, thus “making everything faster and easier to do, with less strain and fewer mental gymnastics.” Third, to achieve ultra-disseminability, an appropriate technological infrastructure is required which is guided by what we call the principle of ultra-connectivity: everything is physically connected to the web of ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous Computing “is fundamentally characterized by the connection of things in the world with computation. This will take place at many scales, including the microscopic.”

What are the possible effects of this massive deployment of technology upon things, environments, and, in particular, ourselves, future users of the technology? We believe that to be able to achieve an appropriate understanding of the social and ethical issues arising from such deploy- ment, it is necessary to develop first a clear understanding of how things and environments would be transformed by this technology, as well as an understanding of how our involvement with them would be consequently transformed.

Our task, then, is twofold. First, we develop the basic elements of an ontological perspective from which we can address the issues of interest. Starting with Martin Heidegger’s analysis of “equipment” and the structure of “being in the world,” we focus on our involvement with things and identify a fundamental ontological dimension of such involvement, namely, “otherness,” which will play a crucial role in the analysis. Second, we examine the proposals for Ubiquitous Computing from the perspective previously developed. After examining the principles underlying this technology, we focus on several scenarios illustrating possible applications of Ubiquitous Computing. By examining these scenarios from the ontological perspective, we are able to determine potential transformations on the ontological structure of things, living beings, and environments. Subsequently, by elaborating on the trans- formed nature of our involvement with these new kinds of things, we are able to identify how they would appear to us, and by extension, how we would encounter a world intensely penetrated with Ubiquitous Computing.

In one of the scenarios, people and things of all kinds have attached or embedded signal emitter devices which are monitored by networks of sensors distributed throughout environments, such as buildings, homes, and airplanes. The identities and locations of people and things are constantly available on the web of ubiquitous computing. To locate, say, a misplaced pair of glasses, we access the web, furnish a description of it, and without much delay receive information about its location, possibly at the office, or in the glove compartment of the car, or even in the overhead compartment of an airplane.

Starting from the observation that in this scenario, in a very real sense, things can no longer become lost, we examine aspects of the “otherness” of things such as their “inaccessibility,” “separateness,” and “independence.” We show how in such scenario these characteristics, which are constitutive of otherness, are significantly “eroded,” leading to a first ontological transformation of things into “things under surveillance.” If we now examine how such things appear to us in our involvement with them, we identify another and more fundamental transformation of “things under surveillance” into “things-under-surveillance.” In this last case, we are dealing with a new kind of being, one which although sharing many characteristics with what we currently call “thing,” differs ontologically from it. An almost invisible, over-reaching apparatus – the web of ubiquitous computing – keeps a constant eye on the thing – on “every” thing. Having virtually bridged the distance that separated it from us, we virtually carry the thing like a “pendant,” to the point that things are no longer “in-de-pendent” from us. What we gain in accessibility, the thing loses in otherness, and we find ourselves involved with somethings that is “less other” than it was before, something that offers us less opportunities for becoming aware of their otherness. In this transformation, due to the changed character of our involvement with them, a thing is now less of a thing than what it used to be. In fact, it is no longer a thing, it has become a “thing-under-surveillance.”

Finally, after having examined several scenarios, we propose an overall characterization of Ubiquitous Computing as “an attempt at the systematic dismantling by computational means of the otherness of things, living beings, and environments.”

AUTHOR
David Anderson

ABSTRACT

The presentation sets out a thought experiment in which a number of today’s technologies are drawn together to produce a sophisticated aid for doctors working in far flung corners of the world. By degrees, features of the example are modified having the effect of permitting ever greater degrees of autonomy for the doctor’s aid and raising questions which tease out some of the ethical issues which stem from using technology to assist medical practice. By the time of the final variation on the example a number of uncomfortable options are the only ‘reasonable’ choices left open.

Version 1

A doctor carries out an urgent medical procedure on an unconscious patient presented to the doctor by a third party.

Question

Who bears moral responsibility for the treatment?

Suggested Answer

Primarily responsibility belongs to the doctor.

Version 2

Suppose a field medical system is developed which permits a specialist to engage in two-way audio-visual communication with a doctor who is presented with a patient as in version 1. Suppose further that the specialist is able to offer advice on treatment which is based on the specialist’s superior knowledge and experience.

Question

Who bears moral responsibility for the treatment?

Suggested Answer

This is a little less clear. There is clearly a balance to be struck between the specialist and the doctor but all the responsibility seems to lie with the medical personnel (however apportioned).

Version 3

Instead of the doctor being assisted by a human specialist the advice comes from a sophisticated medical Expert System. As before, the ES is able to offer advice on treatment which is superior to the doctor who administers the treatment.

Question

Who bears moral responsibility for the treatment?

Suggested Answer

There being only one person actively involved there seems little choice but to say that the doctor is wholly responsible. But there is a problem – in version 2, the doctor (who exercised professional judgement in exactly the same way as in version 3) was thought to have less than complete moral responsibility for the treatment. Surprisingly, the use of technology seems to have increased the doctor’s personal responsibility.

Version 4

A device is developed which enables doctors and specialists not only to advise colleagues at some geographical distance on treatment regimes, but perhaps by means of a number of remote controlled instruments also permits them to carry out treatment directly. So this version removes the local doctor and considers remote treatment.

Question

Who bears moral responsibility for the treatment?

Suggested Answer

Ethically, this looks exactly like version1. The doctor carrying out the treatment bears full responsibility.

Version 5

The specialist carrying out the treatment in version 4 is replaced by a medical Expert System.

Question

Who bears moral responsibility for the treatment?

Suggested Answer

A number of uncomfortable possibilities present themselves. The ES programmers may be thought responsible but as they are not present this seems a little inappropriate. The person who authorises the use of the ES perhaps or the medical experts whose expertise is being used in the ES, or no-one. A further possibility perhaps most uncomfortable of all remains – the ES itself is responsible.

Version 6

The Expert System used in version 5 is replaced by an ES which is the result of a combination of Neural Nets and Genetic Algorithms.

Question

Who bears moral responsibility for the treatment?

Suggested Answer

Here the dilemma is sharpest of all. It seems that there are four positions which are arguable and only the last two seem to be at all tempting:

1. The medical authorities are the responsible agents. No matter how sophisticated the Expert System might be, it will remain ‘just a machine’ and while it might not require human intervention, from a moral position it remains under human supervision and it is the responsibility of humans to see that it carries out it job properly.
2. The responsibility belongs to the trainers and creators of the machine in an analogous way to the case of the creators of an aeroplane autopilot.
3. There is no moral agent of significance in the example outlined. The Expert System is designed to act in the absence of qualified human medical personnel. Typically, lay people would present themselves or, in emergency, be presented to the ES, and from this point there is only a machine working. It is obvious that machines simply cannot be the bearer of moral predicates. When we say this is a good tractor we do not assert that it is morally estimable we mean that it is a tractor whose performance meets or exceeds reasonable expectations. So it is here. An impressive machine, to be sure but a machine not a moral agent.
4. The Expert System is responsible. In many ways this is the most natural and equitable reaction of all. After all, the Expert Systems works without the intervention of human beings, indeed, it may control and direct the behaviour and actions of human beings. The Expert System is in charge, it responds dynamically and properly to the changing medical circumstances presented. It would be entirely correct to ascribe moral agency to the Expert System were it human (or even a Martian) thus to withhold such ascriptions in the current case are as naked a case of blind prejudice as has ever been documented.

AUTHOR
Yaman Akdeniz

ABSTRACT

This paper will describe the current UK and EU policies on the use of cryptographic tools to secure private communications on the Internet. The paper will concentrate on the importance of using strong encryption tools by the human rights organisations and its importance to establish free, private and anonymous communications without any intrusion by governments and law enforcement agencies throughout the world.

AUTHOR
Alberto Abruzzese and Carlo Grasi

ABSTRACT

Every criterion of social phenomenon qualitative evaluation and its material and immaterial products are on the break-point between generic form of industrial systems and localistic forms of post-industrial systems. In this break-point it should regenerate every classical questions of the modern thought: on politics, aestethics and ethics (direct democracy or representative democracy; relationship between information and consent; relationship between culture and widespread consuption; relationship between pornography or media violence and society; relationship between television and children; relationship between majority and minority, etc.). In this break-point should start a deconstruction and rebuild radical process of values and rules. In the modern societies difficulties on building values and norms good for anybody is prevailing, i.e. negotiated in massificate ambients and then characterized by strong powers egemony, modelled both on joint identities and predominantly one-way (i.e. top-bottom and centre-periphery), and, in any case, frontal interactions (individual vs. collectivity; production vs. consumption; power vs. mass; knowledge vs. istinct).

In the post-modern societies is prevailing the opposite difficulty. To the great systems of general interests solidity and solidariety, is contrasted the social necessity of build new values and new rules, although they are valid only in limited fields. They are characterized by emergence of singular identities, founded on interactivity and transversality high-level interactions among all post-modern society members.

In the modern societies social policies, aestetichs and ethics have colonized or marginalized localized forms of the human experience because their modern calling (the physical territory as “membering”; the body as the sensorial environment of the “to be there” [it. esserci, ger. Dasein]; moreover, the person as hisself-desire). In the post-modern societies these very localistic signification forms go further languages dominion and generalists customs. In this way they are weakened till the breaking of their legitimacy, without be replaced in their ancient cohesive function.

Our present time is characterized by a synchronyc intersection between two opposite movements: the first is the connection we have with the old system and its specific dichotomies between localistic forms of memberships and collectives forms of representation (nation, state, parties, institutions, etc.) and, the other is the breaking which is opening between the identitary processes new quality and the systems models which have mediated between parts and the whole up today. Under this side the new media nature (namely communications and representations forms available with the ITCs), are responding to the critical state of both these moments: it can support localism (of the local site, of the body, of the person, of the community) but, moreover, raise the globalization processes level at a planetary dimension. That push new media further the national and international dispositives of which modern systems have enjoyed and more deeply in comparison to the mass-media power control.

If the cybernetic technology quality is able to satisfy both the modern tradition and its opposite, than its relationship with ethical and social values is depending upon political negotiation of its use, of the ends we ascribe it, of the product which will be estabilished on the market. In this clash all the historically used for social control machineries are objectively more backward than consumer cultures. From ethical and social tension they have for contrasting new media emerge a very interesting paradox.

Traditional paradigms of modernity reaffirm a conventional formula: what pretend to contain the uncontrolled effects of the market push by means of socially motivated rules as the social interests, solidarity, quality of life and equality. The appeal to a strong rules system able in filter individual wishes particularity and extremism, push on the use of new technologies which is profitable for globalization processes, and then of the strategies which the modern cultures thinks are reason for authoritaries boundaries and disequality.

So, we deal not with the designing of the innovation technology sense as mapped on the right, the beautiful and the good demands in contrast of the utilitaristic interests brutality. So, we deal not with the filtering of new media significance (thinked as an high-risk revolution or as negative thing) appealling to the traditional values or generalistic systems. Instead we deal with to revolutionize the values to ascribe to technology, so we need to recognize problems to solve, the meaning to attribute to new rules, starting from the root out which human identity suffer in the mass social regimes and in the group representation forms.

New network and virtual technologies value can be negotiated only having made a political and strategical choice. Namely a background choice with which made possible (by means of digital language-based technologies flexibility) not only an antimodernist turn but also all mediation and graduality forms which are now necessary for performing the transit from joint identities to personal one. This have to be a choice which be able not only in thinking but yet in acting for assure the need of a general compatibility to normative universes each other incompatible. This is the real challenge that the epochal changement of the jointly systems centralization oriented to reticular and conflictual systems proliferation is launching us.

English Translation by Antonio Marturano

LOCATION:
Erasmus University, The Netherlands

DATE:
25 to 27 March 1998

HOSTED BY:
Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility, De Montfort University, UK
Research Center on Computing and Society, Southern Connecticut State University, USA
East Tennessee State University, USA

CONFRERENCE DIRECTORS:
Professor Terrell Ward Bynum, Southern Connecticut University, USA
Professor Donald Gotterbarn, East Tennessee State University, USA
Dr Jeroen van den Hoven, Erasmus University, The Netherlands
Simon Rogerson, De Montfort University, UK

Continue reading “ETHICOMP1998 – Rotterdam, Holland”

AUTHOR
Harjinder Rahanu, Jennifer Davies and Simon Rogerson

ABSTRACT

The operation of computer systems and their associated communications systems are central to the economies of the developed world. Yet, failures in such computer systems and their development are more than commonplace. In the last few years there has been increasing concern in the Computer Industry about a neglect of professional ethics which has become manifest in various computer systems failures which have been much hyped in the media. This paper presents a full ethical analysis of such a case and the results of similar analyses of nine further cases, to highlight professional duties, the neglect of which is frequently associated with failure.