DIGIT course: Rights and Freedoms in Digital Design at the University of Bergen
Welcome to the DIGIT "Rights and Freedoms in Digital Design" course, running from May 30-31, 2023 at the University of Bergen. In this course, we will explore the interactions between ethics, law and design, including broader political and regulatory aspects.
Rights and Freedoms in Digital Design
When: May 30-31
Where: University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
Registration: https://nettskjema.no/a/324616
Registration deadline: April 15
Language: English
The course is open for DIGIT members and a group of PhD candidates from Karlstad University. If you are not part of any of these groups, but would like to join, contact the DIGIT coordinator.
Content
Ethical principles such as autonomy and privacy are central to recent efforts to regulate digital innovations. For instance, the recent EU High Level Expert Group on AI ethics aimed for a 'human-centric' approach to AI and built its recommendations on principles taken from bioethics: respect for human autonomy, prevention of harm, fairness and explicability.
Yet, how are such principles applied in highly complex technological, economic, disciplinary and institutional settings? What is the meaning and practice of ethics in highly digitalised environments? And how do ethics interact with other related normative practices such as politics and law? Does ethics increase political reflection and coherence? Or is it contributing to de-politicisation of digital innovations, to 'ethics-washing' of surveillance, exploitation and extraction of users data? Does ethics regulations enable more and better checks and balances on such practices?
In this course, we shall pose such questions, especially focusing on two novel approaches taken for implementation of rights and ethics: risk management and design. The course will be of relevance to students with and interest in ethics, law, governance and politics in digital innovation.
Day 1
“The Ethification of ICT Governance“ - Prof. Niels van Dijk, Vrije Universiteit Brussels
“The Universal Ambitions of AI (...and everything else computational)” - Ass Prof. David Ribes, University of Washington
“Ethical AI – policies of de-politicisation in neoliberal governing?” - Prof. Malin Rönnblom, Karlstad University
“Revisiting the Debate on Ethics Washing in the Context of AI: Theoretical Arguments and Empirical Findings” - Researcher Gernot Rieder, University of Bergen
“(How) Can you build morality into artificially intelligent systems?” Ass Prof. Kjetil Rommetveit University of Bergen, course coordinator
Day 2
Students presentations and comments.
Readings (open in PDF)
From politics to ethics: Transformations in EU policies on digital technology. Vanja Carlsson, Malin Rônnblom.
EU guidelines: Ethics washing made in Europe. Thomas Metzinger.
Privacy engineering and the technoregulatory imaginary. Kjetil Rommetveit, Niels van Dijk.
How I Learned What a Domain Was. David Ribes.
The logic of domains. David Ribes.
Governing by Values. EU Ethics: Soft Tool, Hard Effects. Mariachiara Tallacchini.
The ‘Ethification’ of ICT Governance. Artificial Intelligence and Data Protection in the European Union. Niels van Dijk, Simone Casiraghi, Serge Gutwirth.
AI Ethics, Ethics Washing, and the Need to Politicize Data Ethics. Gijs van Maanen.
Do Artifacts Have Politics? Langdon Winner
Learning outcomes
At the end of the course, students should be able to :
Account for the main principles and approaches to ethics and governance of digital technologies
Account for the main ways in which digital technologies and ethical principles mutually shape each other
Account for the basic traits in the interactions between ethics and law, and ethics and politics
Demonstrate ability to apply the above to a case, possibly closely related to the students' own research, where ethics is applied to governance of digital technology
Examination
There will be a voluntary examination after the course in the form of a course paper, approx. 8-10 pages long. Students who pass the exam will receive a certificate stating the workload and curriculum for the course. The diploma can be used to apply to get the course accepted in your degree at your home institution. Your home institution decides if and how many credits you will get.
Travel and accommodation:
All reasonable travel and accommodation costs will be covered for DIGIT PhD and postdoc members. You will receive more information about this after you have signed up. Please make a request for funding before you make any bookings to the DIGIT coordinator.
Course Coordinator - Kjetil Rommetveit
Kjetil Rommetveit is an Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities at University of Bergen.
Since 2008, Rommetveit has been engaged in research on the governance of technoscience and large-scale ICT system, both in the European Union and nationally in Norway. He has been the main instigator and principal researcher of two FP7 projects (TECHNOLIFE, EPINET) and one Horizon 2020 project called CANDID, dealing with technologies such as biometrics, human enhancements, Geographical Imaging Systems, and autonomous robotics.
From 2021, he is leading the RCN-funded project CoPol: Covid-19 tracing as Digital Politics. He is also the academic coordinator of the Master’s program in Sustainability and interdisciplinarity at the University of Bergen. Drawing on philosophy (hermeneutics, pragmatics) and science and technology studies, his research takes an interpretative approach to governance of science and technology.
Please feel free to contact the DIGIT coordinator should you have any practical questions.
For questions related to the course content, please contact Kjetil Rommetveit