Landscapes of ethical issues of emerging ICT applications in Europe

Abstract

A central problem of the attempt to bring to bear ethical ideas to technology, in particular information and communication technology is that it tends to arrive too late. It would clearly be desirable to have a better understanding of future technological developments in order to allow ethical considerations to influence design and implementations of technology. At the same time, the unavoidable contingency of future developments provides a fundamental limit to what we can know about the future. The current paper explores how this problem can be addressed. It provides a framework of technical developments that one can reasonably expect to materialise in the medium term future (10 to 15 years) and ethical issues that are currently expected to arise. This is done by analysing current European research funding documents with a view to exploring the trends, purposes, applications, artefacts, ethical issues, and governance structures that the European Commission foresees. The overall aim of the paper is to provide the conceptual basis of this framework.