https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2012-01691-2
Regular Article
FuturICT – The road towards ethical ICT
1 Philosophy Section, Delft University of Technology, Jaffalaan 5, PO Box 5015, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands
2 Chair of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation, ETH Zurich, Clausiusstrasse 50, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland
3 Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita di Pisa, via Buonarroti, 2g56125 Pisa, Italia
4 Department of Computer Engineering and Maths, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Av. Països Catalans, 26, 43007 Tarragona, Catalonia
5 Institute of Biomedical Ethics, University of Zurich, Pestalozzistrasse 24, 8032 Zurich, Switzerland
Psychology Department, University of Notre Dame, IN, USA
a e-mail: M.J.vandenHoven@tudelft.nl
Revised:
9
October
2012
Published online:
5
December
2012
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.
© The Author(s) 2012. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com