Ethical things: designing ethical technologies

We are researching how developers of connected technologies make ethical decisions during their product design and development processes

Statisticians as back-office policy-makers: counting asylum-seekers and refugees in Europe

Street-level bureaucracy literature ascertains that policies get made not only in the offices of legislatures or politicians but through the discretion bureaucrats employ in their day-to-day interactions with citizens in government agencies. The discretion bureaucrats use to grant access to public benefits or impose sanctions adds up to what the public ultimately experience as the government and its policies. This perspective, however, overlooks policy-making that gets done in the back offices of government, where there might not be direct interaction with citizens. Furthermore, it treats discretion as inherently anthropogenic and ignores that it is exercised in relation to sociotechnical arrangements of which bureaucrats are a part. In this paper, based on extensive ethnography at national statistical institutes and international statistical meetings across Europe, I make two arguments. The first is that, statisticians emerge as back-office policy-makers as they are compelled to take multiple methodological decisions when operationalizing abstract statistical guidelines and definitions, thus effectively making rather than merely implementing policies. This is the “discretion” they employ, even when they may not interact with citizens. The second argument is that the exercise of discretion is sociotechnical, that is, it happens in relation to the constraints and affordances of technologies and the decisions of other bureaucrats in their institutions and others

From values to things: designing ethical technologies

We are studying how ethical decisions are made by developers of connected technologies: internet of things, and with what implications. Acknowledgements: European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No: 73202

The politics of expertise and ignorance in the field of migration management

This paper shows that the field of migration management features a politics of expertise through which migration is enacted as a reality that can be managed because it can be precisely quantified. For instance, the International Organization for Migration maintains a “Global Migration Flows Interactive App.” This interactive map suggests that the number of people migrating from country A to B can be exactly known at any point in time. This enactment of migration sits in contrast with the widely acknowledged unreliability and noncoherence of migration statistics. This paper investigates how this tension is negotiated through the production of “strategic ignorance” (McGoey) about the known limits of quantifying migration. Drawing on work from ignorance studies we highlight four practices producing strategic ignorance: (1) omission of the significant gap between recorded immigration and emigration events, (2) compression of different accounts of migration into one “world migration map,” (3) deflection of knowledge about the specifities of different methods to production sites of statistical data, and (4) usage of metadata for sanitizing the statistical production process of any messy aspects. Our analysis shows that the politics of expertise in the field of migration management are intertwined with a politics of ignorance

Engaging with ethics in Internet of things: imaginaries in the social milieu of technology developers

Discussions about ethics of Big Data often focus on the ethics of data processing: collecting, storing, handling, analysing and sharing data. Data-based systems, however, do not come from nowhere. They are designed and brought into being within social spaces – or social milieu. This paper connects philosophical considerations of individual and collective capacity to enact practical reason to the influence of social spaces. Building a deeper engagement with the social imaginaries of technology development through analysis of two years of fieldwork with start-ups working on Internet of Things, this paper suggests that different action positions can emerge, with consequences for how data is understood and valued. The Disengaged, Pragmatist and Idealist ethical action positions identified in the paper reveal the ways individuals and groups negotiate possibilities for ethical action, through justifications, explanations and structuring of system features

Politics by automatic means? A critique of artificial intelligence ethics at work

Calls for “ethical Artificial Intelligence” are legion, with a recent proliferation of government and industry guidelines attempting to establish ethical rules and boundaries for this new technology. With few exceptions, they interpret Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics narrowly in a liberal political framework of privacy concerns, transparency, governance and non-discrimination. One of the main hurdles to establishing “ethical AI” remains how to operationalize high-level principles such that they translate to technology design, development and use in the labor process. This is because organizations can end up interpreting ethics in an ad-hoc way with no oversight, treating ethics as simply another technological problem with technological solutions, and regulations have been largely detached from the issues AI presents for workers. There is a distinct lack of supra-national standards for fair, decent, or just AI in contexts where people depend on and work in tandem with it. Topics such as discrimination and bias in job allocation, surveillance and control in the labor process, and quantification of work have received significant attention, yet questions around AI and job quality and working conditions have not. This has left workers exposed to potential risks and harms of AI. In this paper, we provide a critique of relevant academic literature and policies related to AI ethics. We then identify a set of principles that could facilitate fairer working conditions with AI. As part of a broader research initiative with the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, we propose a set of accountability mechanisms to ensure AI systems foster fairer working conditions. Such processes are aimed at reshaping the social impact of technology from the point of inception to set a research agenda for the future. As such, the key contribution of the paper is how to bridge from abstract ethical principles to operationalizable processes in the vast field of AI and new technology at work

Peril v. promise: IoT and the ethical imaginaries

The future scenarios often associated with IoT oscillate between the peril of IoT for the future of humanity and the promises for an ever-connected and efficient future. Such a dichotomous positioning creates problems not only for expanding the field of application of the technology, but also ensuring ethical and responsible design and production

A Twitter-based study of the European Internet of Things

We present a methodology integrating social media data, data from qualitative research and network analysis. Qualitative insights gained from ethnographic fieldwork are used to collect and annotate social network data, and social media data is used as part of the ethnography to identify relevant actors and topics. The methodology is presented in the context of an analysis of the Internet of Things in the European context

Unpaid labour and territorial extraction in digital value networks

Production in knowledge and data-intensive industries is powered by work that can, in theory, be done from anywhere, via cloudwork platforms. Cloudwork platforms govern data value chains in distinct ways to concentrate power and extract value at the global scale. We argue that unpaid labour is a systemic mechanism of accumulation in these digital value networks. In this paper we demonstrate how it is tied to platform business models and facilitated by elements of platform governance including monopsony power, a high degree of spatial flexibility in sourcing labour, regulatory unaccountability and digital enclosure. We draw on a survey of 699 workers on 14 platforms in 74 countries to show that unpaid labour is an engine of South–North value extraction, and workers in the global South perform more unpaid labour than counterparts in the global North. Our findings have important ramifications our understanding of the changing international division of labour and platform capitalism