AUTHOR
Alexander Vengerov

ABSTRACT

This paper is the part of the project exploring a new model of learning organization called MultiTrack MultiStage (MTMS) pattern. The paper analyzes and generalizes the lessons of the 5 year experience with MTMS eLearning design to specific methods and mechanisms of the art of dynamic balancing of local, group, and global harmonies in dynamic distributed technology-intensive socio-pragmatic systems.

The growing problems of complexity, uncertainty, and instability (CUI) in complex adaptive systems tend to further increase with the ubiquity and proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICT), dramatically increasing mutual sensitivity of systems components. The CUI problems make many existing methods of analysis and design of socio-pragmatic systems obsolete. The new approaches have yet to be developed. They are being tackled in various domains of human research. The paper analyzes approaches from such areas as situated cognition, ethics, and philosophy; utility computing and computational grids; grounded research, complex adaptive systems, and holistic engineering while drawing from the experience gained from the specific case of eLearning design dealing with the above mentioned type of environments and situations.

Already Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics saw the main problem in balancing of various forces to some harmonious Golden Mean state. This concept has been significantly enhanced with the development of The Dynamical Systems Theory and other disciplines dealing with the phenomena of complexity and emergence as the view of patterns evolving from some form of balncing contextual forces. Action theory concerns with generalization of agent’s behaviour as a fit to the particular a situation. The tight interconnetion of individual desires, beliefs, and perceptions in the search of the best actions, plans, and strategies fullfilling the desires under the given circumstances formed the foundation of many architectures of artificial intelligent agents as the view on the dynamic interaction of this forces. In economics and other social sciences within the framework of Rational Choice this view underlies much of existing approaches to norms, ethics, justice, etc. However, it has been found that the increasing CUI properties of many situations might upset reasoning based on causality and result into some dynamic evolutionary processes with undetermined causes and uncontrollable and unpredictable ends.

The paper analyzes the emerging situated approaches in ethics, economics, philosphy and sciences focusing on ongoing processes and situational dynamics that determine (or influence) the tactical actions and evolving patterns of behavior. The problem with CUI situations is in the difficulties of applying symbolic reasoning and thus exercize control over the situational evolution. Connectionst approach to the growing power of contexts over evolving patterns has been used in complex systems analysis resulting in studies, modeling, and application of non-symbolic processes supporting overall systems adaptivity and viability. Methods of soft computing including various forms of fuzzy, evolutionary, and reinforcement learning of current contexts use these processes for determining the best course of actions under the curcumstances of the given situations. The growing holistic properties of the situations agents are in can impede not only the controlling abilities over the one’s future, but make it difficult even to properly formulate it.

In most complex modern environments found in computational grids, we can see multiple interwoven inetersts, conflicts, and perceptions of local situations and views of the proper “global order.” There is a growing shift in this area from behaviors aiming not at particular (often changing and fuzzy) goals but at more general utilities, leaving situation- action-goal dynamics to the holistic evolutionry forces. Acknowledging the importance of the situational distributed multiagent learning in the process of balancing the perception of local, group, and higher forms of harmony, the present paper offers the analysis and some generalizations of the experience with one of the most complex patterns of learning design (MTMS) as a socio-pragmatic technology-based complex system. It is based on the methods of management of the learning ecology, gently steering (since control is impossible and even unethical under the circumstance) its dynamics to the advantageous forms and its results meeting learning objectives.

The MTMS pattern deals with scalable eLearning environments capable to include hundreds of participants as well as automated and semi-automated resources and processes. This view reflects the problem, which the MTMS pattern was designed to solve – the one of an effective, efficient, and self-correcting learning process for students with diverse individual educational goals, prior knowledge, skills, and socio-cultural backgrounds. Such diversity results in methods and mechanisms of steering this micro-society toward planned educational goals. These mechanisms and methods are very different from those in more homogenous classes. The specifics of MTMS is in the fact that the tight control of learning activities in the described situation is not only impossible but also unethical, leading to the need of stimulating the individual design of learning contexts with desirable degree of exploration, experiences, and social interactions enriched and corrected by the very diversity of actors. After the analysis of MTMS performance the paper offers some generalization of the methods and patterns of balancing local, group, and global harmonies that include the mix of the social and pragmatic utilities and experiences.

AUTHOR
Jacek Unold

ABSTRACT

This research is supported by a Marie Curie International Fellowship (2005-2008) within the 6th European Community Framework Program

The issue of human behavior within an information system is the most recent research trend in the area of information systems development (ISD). In 1994 Akio Morita, the founder of Sony Corp., pointed to the constantly growing gap between the world of business, and generally a society, and the new world of information technology, and called it the “IT/business gap.” Arguably, it was the first human aspect within the area of IS that was detected so clearly. The problem identified by Morita concerned individual attitudes and actions. It still reflects a more general approach to the issue of ISD: the scope of interests within this area has focused mainly on technological aspects so far. If the human component is taken into account, it has been analyzed from the level of an individual. So have all new concepts of rationality. However, the Internet revolution and an unprecedented growth of dispersed collectivities denote a necessity of a new perspective on the society and organization.

This paper argues that collective behavior, which is a basic determinant of the dynamics of a Global IS, does not proceed in a planned manner, but is adaptive and follows certain patterns found in nature. It follows that this behavior can be expressed in a model form, which enables to structure it. Most generally, the research method is based on the identification and analysis of the determinants of the IS dynamics. It then relates this phenomenon to the behavior of a social subsystem of this IS, thus, to the issue of collective behavior. The point is to identify a quantitative dimension of this, otherwise known as purely qualitative, phenomenon. It appears that this social subsystem reveals all four attributes of a nonlinear, complex adaptive system. This allows for the application of the most recent achievements of complexity theory and chaos theory. Thousands of independent and difficult to observe transactions, carried out by individual participants of the market, generate an emergence of specific and predictable patterns of collective behavior. These phenomena can only be identified on the higher – collective, not individual – level of social organization. The fundamental challenge of this project is to find a quantitative measure of that emergence.

A model exemplification of a Global Information System is a modern, electronic, stock exchange, because the performance of capital markets is a typical example of crowd reactions. The identification of quantitative characteristics of a social subsystem within a Global IS can provide substantial theoretical and methodological premises for the extension of the optimizing and individualistic notion of rationality by the social and adaptive aspects.

AUTHOR
J. Barrie Thompson

ABSTRACT

The call for papers for ETHICOMP 2007 highlights the need to bridge the global nature of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the local nature of human beings. There is no doubt that, with regard to ICT, we now exist in a global market place where, for example, software can be specified in the USA, developed in India, and then used by individuals globally on the Internet. However, there is also a downside. The failure of many software projects to meet their objectives, or indeed the termination of partially completed projects, is an all too often occurrence. The ongoing problem of poor quality software has been repeatedly highlighted in published studies [e.g. 1] and by high profile software-related failures. For the individual, or society, to have confidence in the ICT systems, which now impinge so significantly on their lives, there is a clear requirement for greater professionalism throughout the ICT sector.

Over the last decade, interest in professionalism within the ICT sector has waxed and waned. For example, during the 1990s the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), following encouragement from the World Trade Organisation, initiated activities related to defining international standards for professionals in the field of Information Technology. These activities finally led in 1999 to the release of a document entitled “Harmonization of Professional Standards” [2]. However, despite very positive evaluations regarding its proposals in the early years of this decade [3] there appears to have been little will, until this year, to advance its acceptance and address some particular deficiencies.

The ongoing problems associated with poor quality software and high profile failures have recently acted as catalysts for particular national computing bodies to address professionalism in proactive manner. In particular, the British Computer Society has undertaken since 2005 an ambitiously managed programme [4] with two key objectives:

By increasing professionalism, to improve the ability of business and other organisations to exploit the potential of information technology effectively and consistently.

To build an IT profession that is respected and valued by its stakeholders- Government, business leaders, IT employers, IT users and customers – for the contribution that it makes to a more professional approach to the exploitation and application of IT.

The ETHICOMP paper will chart the recent global and national developments relating to professionalism in the ICT sector and will provide a critical appraisal of the likely effectiveness of initiatives such as that currently being undertaken by the British Computer Society. It will also cover new international work that IFIP has initiated following a highly successful workshop “Improving IT Practitioner Skills”, which was held immediately after this year’s World Computer Conference in Chile on 25th August. Finally an evaluation will be presented to assesses whether we are approaching a situation where IFIP’s definition for professionals, viz.

• Publicly ascribe a code of ethics published within the standard.
• Be aware of and have access to a well-documented current body of knowledge relevant to the domain of practice.
• Have a mastery of the body of knowledge at the baccalaureate level.
• Have a minimum of the equivalent of two years supervised experience before the practitioner operates unsupervised.
• Be familiar with current best practice and relevant proven methodologies.
• Be able to provide evidence of their maintenance of competence.

is acceptable to a global audience.

REFERENCES

[1] BCS, The Challenges of Complex IT Projects. The report of a working group from The Royal Academy of Engineering and The British Computer Society. Available online:

http://www.bcs.org/bcs/news/positionsandresponses/positions/complexity.htm, 2004.

IEEE Computer, Vol. 33, No. 5, pp 44-50, May 2000.

[2] Mitchell I., Juliff P., and Turner J., Harmonization of Professional Standards, International Federation of Information Processing, 1998, at: http://www.ifip.or.at

[3] Thompson, J. B. Evaluations of IFIP’s Proposed Standards for Professionals. In Proceedings of the 8th IFIP World Conference on Computers in Education, (WCCE 2005), Session P10.3. University of Stellenbosch, Cape Town, South Africa, July 4-7, 2005.

[4] BCS Professionalism in IT Programme, covered in a series of articles in the May 2006 issue of IT NOW, British Computer Society, Swindon, UK.

AUTHOR
Bernd Carsten Stahl

ABSTRACT

There is general agreement that privacy is an important value that is worth protecting. The agreement does not extend, however, to the definition of privacy, its limits or the way it should best be protected. Much debate in the field of computer and information ethics deals with the conceptual foundation of privacy with regards to information and communication technology. This debate is often of a high conceptual and philosophical level of sophistication. At the same time it tends to neglect the crucial question of implementation. Clearly, if privacy is to be protected in a democratic society, then laws and their enforcement have a role to play.

Most western countries now have statutory privacy protection regimes in place. There is much debate among legal scholars concerning the consistency and coherence of legal approaches. Privacy protection legislation can be passed at different levels and for different purposes. Different statutes provide for different means of privacy protection and create diverging exceptions.

There are different research disciplines with an interest in privacy. Apart from the two just outlined very briefly, namely computer ethics and law, there are many others. Privacy is of importance for online commercial exchange and it is an important factor in the creation and maintenance of trust. Furthermore, privacy is an interesting field of study for criminologists who discuss the concept in their own field. Sociologists can be interested in privacy as well as economists. Briefly, there is a plethora of discourses on privacy. Many of these discourses overlap to some degree but they also tend to be held without much cross-fertilisation.

In the proposed paper I intend to contrast two of these discourses, namely the computer ethics and the legal one. The purpose of this approach is to show that the different approaches can enlighten each others’ shortcomings. I will start with a discussion of privacy and its normative foundations and justifications as we know it from the field of computer ethics. This review of the literature will show that there are several competing understandings and meanings of privacy that display subtle but important differences.

In the second step I will use the English legal system to investigate how privacy protection is legally supported. The emphasis will be on the Human Rights Act 1998, the first English statute that expressly introduced the concept of privacy into English law. That does not mean, however, that there are no other statutory ways of protecting privacy. Two of the dominant ones are the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. Looking at statutory as well as case law, I will argue that the notion of privacy underlying the ECHR is different and wider than the notion of privacy underlying traditional English law.

This argument will show the value of interdisciplinary research on privacy. Using the conceptual differentiations developed in the computer and information ethics field will be shown to be able to contribute to our understanding of legal manifestations of privacy. The paper should thus be understood as a call to further cross-disciplinary work in the area of privacy.

AUTHOR
Paul Sollie

ABSTRACT

Going on the insight of various scientific disciplines, such as economics and environmental studies, I will argue that uncertainty is a concept essential and central to many contemporary debates, like that of technology development in general and radio-frequency identification technology (hereafter RFID) in particular. However, within the field of moral philosophy the concept of uncertainty has not received any substantial attention; rather, it is a notion scarcely explored and scrutinised. In this paper I will argue for (1) the necessity of ethics to reflect upon uncertainty. On the one hand this will involve a theoretical analysis, conceptualising uncertainty via a typology formulated in other scientific disciplines. On the other hand, its importance will be exemplified by RFID technologies; a global technology with local impact involving many issues of uncertainty.

I will then show that (2) this scrutiny offers interesting insights for the debate on ethics of technology. Uncertainty is paramount, particularly in the field of technology development (more than in other fields of applied ethics) and its proactive, ex-ante ethical assessment. Based on the analysis of uncertainty and the case of RFID, I will conclude with identifying problems for an ethics of technology and then try and offer a preliminary sketch for any future ethics of technology.

First, uncertainty within the field of technology development will be discussed. Uncertainty within technology development relates to the characteristics of complex, generic technology development, which include among other things the many agents involved, intransparant R&D trajectories, and indeterminacy regarding use and impact. These features pertain to the uncertainty surrounding technology development, which makes an ethics of technology stand out as ethically special compared to other more straightforward, linear, unequivocal and well-calculable cases in ethics, like Philippa Foot’s famous ‘trolley case’.

Next, because a systematic reflection on uncertainty is lacking in ethics of technology, I will discuss and introduce a typology of uncertainty that differentiates between its nature (the class of uncertainty; epistemological, ontological, moral), its levels (how uncertain is x on a continuum from indeterminate to determinate), and its sources or locations (where does uncertainty arrive from: context, model, data, etc). I will argue that in using this typology and introducing it into the field of technology development we might arrive at a clearer picture of exactly what is uncertain in a specific development and how it is uncertain and where it originates. These different dimensions will prove to add to discussion on formulating a methodology for morally evaluating complex technology development.

To exemplify this, I will discuss RFID technology, which is a widely trumpeted, new area of technology that allows for tracking-and-tracing and monitoring of both artefacts and beings. RFID is used to track-and-trace stocks in warehouses, to monitor wandering elderly with dementia, to read out passport data, etc. Much of the debate on RFID focuses on its ethical aspects, predominantly privacy. However, RFID also signifies a new species of technology that, as I will show, has impact on the debates of an ethics of technology under uncertainty. I will argue that RFID is a technology that stands apart from other technologies by identifying two trends. The first trend refers to ubiquitous computing, i.e. technology receding to the background of our lives. The second trend is that RFID signifies a global technology empowering society over individuals. It distinctively gives power to global and large-scale agents (governments, big corporations) that has local impact on individuals. I will focus on one aspect namely the uncertainty surrounding RFID and argue that, using the typology introduced, it has many dimensions that impact on its ethical assessment and ethics of technology at large.

What the abstract analysis of technology development and the example of RFID point at is that generic technology development is fraught with uncertainty. The uncertainty surrounding technology development has impact on its ethical assessment by moral philosophy. Any attempt to provide an account of an ethics of technology might seem daunting given the fact of uncertainty (due to the long and complex chain of developments, the many agents involved, and value pluralism). However, I will argue, that this criticism applies to substantial (traditional) theories, which are in need of information in order to be able to evaluate technology development. Any future ex-ante, pro-active ethics of technology should therefore be procedural of nature, not substantive. This is the direction I am convinced an ethics of technology should advance, because substantial accounts will inevitably prove to be insufficient to guide the assessment for complex and uncertain developments.

AUTHOR
Jacek Sojka

ABSTRACT

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is now an obvious way of doing business, shopping, teaching and simply staying in touch. We seem to be members of a new community of internet users. As one of the authors writing about cyberspace said (A.R. Stone in 1991): virtual communities can be defined as “incontrovertibly social spaces in which people still meet face-to-face.” Then he added:”…but under new definitions of both ‘meet’ and ‘face’.”

And this is exactly my problem in this paper: how should we define this type of meeting. Is it possible to define face-to-face in a new way? I am not an expert in the field of electronic media, digital technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology etc. I can only be a modest commentator of what I have read in books or found in the internet. But at the same time I cannot refrain myself from seeing inconsistencies or dubious beliefs in what I read and what I listen to. More general question comes to mind: Why should I trust somebody’s else visions and forecasts spurred by the development of information and communication technology?

My aim in the proposed paper can be described as a reflection on the way we understand ourselves and our achievements, including the technological ones. In other words it will deal with the mechanisms of interpretation which – by the way – are always relative to and dependent on culture. I am also convinced about the necessity of a critical distance to what is being said and written about the future of culture, society or humanity. Decades ago Jean Francois Lyotard wrote about the incredulity towards the metanarratives, great visions or grand stories about the salvation of mankind. (Pioneering the so-called postmodern thinking in the humanities.) Why today should I believe in the salvation of mankind by the IT?

Charles Jonscher in his book “Wired Life. Who Are We in the Digital Age?” wrote in conclusion that there were two lessons to be drawn from the history of electronic technology. “First, almost all forecasts (predictions) concerning future possibilities (potentials) of the technology itself should be regarded as too restrained (limited); second, almost every prediction about the role of technology in everyday life must be regarded as exaggerated.”

Indeed, if we are able to foresee what kind of innovations or technical achievements will be possible in the future – there will be no space for a real innovation and novelty. By definition – “real” novelty must be an unprecedented one, something beyond imagination and, in fact, unpredictable.

The above suggestion about the role of technical innovations in everyday life does not address here – I think – the simple fact that my e-mail message can reach the addressee sooner than a letter mailed in a traditional way (and – one might say – this is not a breathtaking achievement). Rather it deals with the fact that the content of my e-mail and the whole computer mediated communication depends on our understanding of the world and of ourselves, on the notion of “who we are” and the question is whether these “definitions” can be easily changed. In most cases the identity of the participants of an electronic communication cannot undergo revolutionary changes.

Some visions of the future imply that humans will be too dependent on the virtual reality and too satisfied with this artificial world at the cost of being sensitive to the minds and souls of “real” people who have once started the creation of virtual images. Jonscher said that human beings are unfathomable and unpredictable and these characteristics cannot be simulated in any virtual reality. On the other hand they are immersed in culture, socialized in real communities and the crucial question is to what extent one can do without traditional communities and traditional bonds between individuals.

Predictions about the human condition in the future electronic world(s), all visions concerning the future are always rooted in today’s understanding of the world and of ourselves. They describe the new humankind forgetting about the role of today’s culture. What we say about the future reflects our today’s expectations. Culture contains all notions and values out of which every vision will be built or constructed. Manuel Castells wrote that informational capitalism based on innovation and globalisation is more than ever tooled by technology and embedded in culture. Culture does matter.

In the proposed paper I would like to expand on the idea that culture is always “conservative”; it determines our perception of the world and of other human beings, including the vision of future worlds and the place of human beings in this future. When we understand this mechanism and the role of culture in our perception of the world – we are better prepared do speculate about the future. It will be a self-conscious speculation, a much more prudent vision.

To support this thesis this article will offer a short history of modern dreams about the future unity of mankind from Francis Bacon and his “Novum Organum” to Charles Baudelaire’s “artificial paradise” and to the so-called transhumanist movement.