Journal of responsible technology最新文献

We reflect on our experiences using Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in the project “TAS for Health at Home”. Driven by a multi-disciplinary research team that consisted of experts in mental health, stroke rehabilitation, management of multiple sclerosis, human factors, human-computer interaction, privacy, cybersecurity, architecture, and Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) groups, the project aimed at eliciting user perceptions of autonomous systems supporting healthcare regimes at home. We discuss the home as a unique place to consider RRI approaches and reflect on the actual process of carrying out RRI within the project, including the multi-disciplinarity of the project, our engagement with PPI groups, and how we involved the wider community concerned with Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS). We conclude by summarising our reflections and providing a first step towards RRI-based guidelines for developing healthcare technology for the home.

In developing Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS), as in other domains of technology innovation and research, there is a need to make research processes and activities more accessible to external partners and to the wider public. In this article, we describe the rationale, background and potential for an Open Laboratories approach that complements current strategies in Responsible Research and Innovation and in Open Science, relating this to experience-based aspects of trust in new technologies. We also reflect on the value and benefits of robotic telepresence as an engagement tool that can provide direct access and first-person experience of research, in a manner that is scalable and safe while mitigating some environmental and health concerns.

The growing pervasiveness of smart technologies in our lives has the undeniable potential to both increase welfare as well as promote our autonomy. However, as with any new kind of technology, the use of smart devices and systems give rise to urgent moral challenges. One variety of such technology that appears to be on the cusp of a far greater impact on society is that of smart wearables. An important facet of balancing these consequences - both preserving the benefits while recognising and compensating for the challenges - is determining the conditions for the distribution of digital sovereignty that best achieves this balance. This piece offers only a steppingstone toward this wider project by examining the most important moral issues raised by the introduction and use of wearables for individual users, with the aim of arriving at a set of crucial moral considerations that the current designers and purveyors of these technologies have a moral duty to reflect and act upon to ensure the distribution of individual digital sovereignty best able to balance the benefits and challenges. The result of this will be a set of moral calculi that any attempt to distribute digital sovereignty smart wearables will have to consider and address if it is to provide a morally satisfactory distribution.

Integration of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) principles into a research project is key to ensure outputs are ethically acceptable and socially desirable. However, translating RRI principles into practice is challenging as there are no recipes that fit all projects. Drawing on interviews and case studies with researchers, external partners and support staff associated with two linked programmes of research addressing trustworthy autonomous systems and the ethical use of personal data, this reflective paper provides a bottom-up perspective on RRI as it is understood and “done” within the focussed, often relatively short, research projects that largely comprise the research programmes. Existing RRI frameworks and tools were found to provide useful resources for use in supported RRI activities. However, effective use is dependant on facilitation by experienced staff, and time pressure and timing within a project can limit the application of RRI. Research institutions and funding bodies could provide more practical and sustained support for RRI practice – throughout the research lifespan - including incentives for RRI and clearer RRI/RI roles and career pathways, helping to develop an embedded community of RRI practice throughout the digital research community and beyond.

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) aims to achieve the goal of making research activities responsible and ethical. To those ends, it is vital for researchers to actively engage with equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) which, if not attended to, may detrimentally affect both potential research participants and the research itself.

Our paper offers an account of our ongoing discussions surrounding the importance of EDI when designing our research, how we employed EDI to intentionally make our recruitment process more inclusive, and our ongoing planning to make all our research activities as inclusive, diverse, and accessible as possible.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach for adopting EDI principles in RRI, however, we posit that their consideration is essential for research communities who wish their work to represent the perspectives of those who will be affected by future novel technologies.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have quickly become an important part of the blockchain economy, theoretically representing ownership of a digital asset registered on a public blockchain such as Ethereum. While several applications of this technology exist, the key underlying factor in NFTs’ success is in their potential for investment – buying, selling, and trading the digital assets such as artwork or video game items using cryptocurrency. The rise and mid-2022 crash of NFT and associated crypto markets have shown the volatility of the sector, and questions have been raised around the sustainability, environmental impact, and exploitative practices within this space – and whether there are, in fact, any possible socially responsible use cases for NFTs. This paper aims to fill a gap in the literature surrounding NFTs, primarily through a thorough ethical analysis of the technology and its implementation, deployment, and sustainability. To do this, it uses the Association of Computing Machinery's Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct as a framework for analysis and, following this analysis, makes some recommendations for those wishing to investigate and/or implement NFTs in an ethically responsible manner. The key message is that unless there is absolutely no other way to solve a problem other than using NFTs, then they should not be implemented, as there is currently no ethical use case or means of implementation of NFTs.

The expectations of professionals working on the development of healthcare Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and the patients who will be affected by them have received limited attention. This paper reports on a Foresight Workshop with professionals involved with pulmonary hypertension (PH) and a Focus Group with members of a PH patient group, to discuss expectations of AI development and implementation. We show that while professionals and patients had similar expectations of AI, with respect to the priority of early diagnosis; data risks of privacy and reuse; and responsibility, other expectations differed. One important point of difference was in the attitude toward using AI to point up other potential health problems (in addition to PH). A second difference was in the expectations regarding how much clinical professionals should know about the role of AI in diagnosis. These findings allow us to better prepare for the future by providing a frank appraisal of the complexities of AI development with foresight, and the anxieties of key stakeholders.

What does the I in the composite “AI” stand for? The answer to this guiding question appears to be straightforward, namely intelligence; however, at secunda facie, one might wonder what intelligence really is. Even though definitions of intelligence have been provided in psychology, neuroscience, and animal cognition research, among others, these crude approaches turn out to be overly systematic, rigid and reductive (Hoffmann, 2022b). At the same time, novel types of Artificial Intelligence (AI), from social robots to cognitive assistants, are provoking the demand for new answers for meaningful comparison with other kinds of intelligence. In this paper, we devote ourselves to addressing this need by proposing an open malleable and loose framework for making sense of intelligence in humans, other animals and AI, which is ultimately based on causal learning as the central theme of intelligence. The goal is to showcase the instrumental value of this framework for AI responsibilization.

This paper discusses Responsible (Research and) Innovation (RRI) within a UKRI project funded through the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub, Imagining Robotic Care: Identifying conflict and confluence in stakeholder imaginaries of autonomous care systems. We used LEGO® Serious Play® as an RRI methodology for focus group workshops exploring sociotechnical imaginaries about how robots should (or should not) be incorporated into the existing UK health-social care system held by care system stakeholders, users and general publics. We outline the workshops’ protocol and some emerging insights from early data collection, including the ways that LSP aids in the surfacing of tacit knowledge, allowing participants to develop their own scenarios and definitions of ‘robot’ and ‘care’. We further discuss the implications of LSP as a method for upstream stakeholder engagement in general and how this may contribute to embedding RRI in robotics research on a larger scale.

This paper makes connections between the EPSRC AREA Framework for Responsible Research Innovation (RRI) and sociological, feminist and post-positivist methodological contributions to consider how the interpretive frames central to these traditions can bring valuable insights to practices of RRI. We argue that taking this interdisciplinary approach enables understanding the research process as a form of proficient craftwork or techne. Techne allows the richness of research methods debates to inform ways in which epistemic protocols can be strategically adjusted and reconfigured to more fully embed RRI principles in every stage of the research process. This enhances researchers’ capacity to minimise some of the undesirable and potentially harmful side effects of research practice and strive towards social good. We draw on fieldwork notes produced as part of our research on industrial cleaning robotics to illustrate how our craftwork approach to RRI is conducted in practice.