2012
Journal article  Open Access

FuturICT - The road towards ethical ICT

Van Den Hoven J., Helbing D., Pedreschi D., Domingo-Ferrer J., Giannotti F., Christen M.

Computer Science - Computers and Society  10222 Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine  Materials Science(all)  Physics and Astronomy(all)  1606 Physical and Theoretical Chemistry  610 Medicine & health  General Materials Science  Computers and Society (cs.CY)  General Physics and Astronomy  FOS: Computer and information sciences  3100 General Physics and Astronomy  Digital Libraries (cs.DL)  Computer Science - Digital Libraries  ICT  2500 General Materials Science  Physical and Theoretical Chemistry 

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.

Source: The European physical journal. Special topics (Online) 214 (2012): 153–181. doi:10.1140/epjst/e2012-01691-2

Publisher: Springer Verlag (distrib.),, Heidelberg , Francia


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BibTeX entry
@article{oai:it.cnr:prodotti:219019,
	title = {FuturICT - The road towards ethical ICT},
	author = {Van Den Hoven J. and Helbing D. and Pedreschi D. and Domingo-Ferrer J. and Giannotti F. and Christen M.},
	publisher = {Springer Verlag (distrib.),, Heidelberg , Francia},
	doi = {10.1140/epjst/e2012-01691-2 and 10.48550/arxiv.1210.8181},
	journal = {The European physical journal. Special topics (Online)},
	volume = {214},
	pages = {153–181},
	year = {2012}
}

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