Making Sense of the Digital Society

Advances in digital technologies in general and artificial intelligence in particular have stirred high hopes and deep fears at the same time. High expectations of great advancements in science, industry and society are confronted with equally grave concerns regarding threats to civil rights, societal values and democratic liberties posed by such technologies. As a consequence, requests have been voiced demanding the ethical design of such technologies, a trend mirrored in many recent policy papers. But how exactly can fundamental rights and moral values be accounted for in the design, development and management of systems as diverse as the Facebook newsfeed, search engines, and automated-decision making tools predicting anything from creditworthiness to recidivism?

Judith Simon is Professor of Ethics in Information Technology at the University of Hamburg. She is interested in ethical, epistemological and political questions in the context of big data, Artificial Intelligence and digitization in general. She is a member of the German Ethics Council and of numerous other advisory boards and commissions. In 2020 she published the Routledge Handbook of Trust and Philosophy.