2024
The Trouble with Ethics in Technical Practice
PhD Thesis
Ethics in the design of technology has a long history of debate, that periodically surfaces with more urgency than at other times. The fast progression of development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems in the last years is one of such times. As a result, conversations around ethics have spread beyond the field of moral philosophy, and the disciplines of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), computer science, data science and engineering are working towards creating generally applicable forms of applied ethics for the field. Of course, many controversies remain, and debates around what such applied ethics might look like touch on broad political and economical tensions, with plenty of critical studies highlighting the interconnectedness of technological progress and social issues.
In this thesis, I examine such tensions from the perspective of practice of designing technology, with particular consideration of relational aspects of ethics and the social dimensions informing the envisioning and making of technology. Ethics in this framing is considered as the ongoing process of making decisions based on moral judgements. My work takes this examination beyond the exploration of normative judgements and prescriptive guidelines, into the fields of envisioned futures, and affective experiences of moral tensions and value trade offs.
You can download the digital thesis from the Royal Library of Copenhagen
