THE ROLE OF ETHICS IN SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND EMERGENT TECHNOLOGY

Professor Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem, Department of Philosophy, University of Pretoria

Wednesday 22 January 1.00 pm COURSE FEES R110; Staff and students R55

Chair of the UNESCO World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST), Professor Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem will explain from her perspective why ethics is an enabler of science and technology and not a hindrance. To illustrate this, she will clarify the significance of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for current planning around the governance of AI technology. The relationship between ethics and human rights, and standards and principles will be explained to demonstrate that ethics is also an enabler of international law rather than a competitor with human rights law when it comes to regulating emergent technologies such as AI. The lecture will close with an analysis of the kind of ethics we need to safeguard humanity in the face of emergent technologies such as those relating to AI and climate change.

 

Recommended reading

Floridi, L. 2019. Translating Principles into Practices of Digital Ethics: Five Risks of Being Unethical.

Philosophy & Technology 32. pp. 185–193. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-019-00354-x

Jobin, A., Lenca, M. and Vayena, E. 2019. The Global Landscape of AI Ethics Guidelines. Nature Machine Intelligence 1. pp. 389–399. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0088-2

Pizzi, M., Romanoff, M. and Engelhardt, T. 2020. AI for humanitarian action: Human rights and ethics.

International Review of the Red Cross. 102 (913). Digital technologies and war. pp. 145–180. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1816383121000011

Stahl, B.C. et al. 2023. Exploring ethics and human rights in artificial intelligence: A Delphi study.

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 191. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2023.122502

UNESCO. 2021. UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000380455

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