Journal of Responsible Technology Special Issue |

This call for papers for a Special Issue of the Journal of Responsible Technology focuses on the themes that emerged from the workshops at ORBIT’s 2019 conference, Women in AI & Ethics. More detailed introductions to the themes of the conference are below.

The special issue will be entitled Preserving and Flourishing – how can technology support the wellbeing of individuals, communities and the environment? Questions that authors may like to address include:

The issues of late-stage capitalism as a systemic and economic underpinning for ICT technologies, eg

Concerns emerging from technologies being rooted in a profit-making motivation – for example the tracking of children online
The question of whether the current model is the way society wants to incorporate life-changing technology that may permanently alter its course. (cf Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshanna Zuboff).
The difference between growth and flourishing – for example GDP vs other methodologies, sustainability and the environment.

Articulating the values that society should be trying to embed, preserve and promulgate.

These might include, for example, values of solidarity, cooperation and community – which currently lack weight when measured against values that prioritise individual protection, and individual justice and fairness.
Investigating political and technological reforms that can help to fulfil the existing social contract – which is not being fulfilled by the ways that algorithms are currently developed and implemented.

Finding new ways to think about and frame machine learning technologies, to understand how public discourse and society can better grapple with the challenges they present.

Recognising the value of social science concepts such as metaphor, analogy and narrative to understand the ways in which technology and humanity can co-exist and co-evolve.
This includes questions such as how we view social media – is a platform, a publisher, or a public utility?
Demystifying AI so that genuine questions and challenges can be distinguished from hype and marketing.

Retaining the ‘human’ element in machine-assisted systems – for example, requiring intelligibility from systems and accountability for algorithmic decisions.

Articulating whether decision-making systems act in support of human decisions, or replace them – are there areas of decision-making that we decide are ‘no-go’ regions for algorithms?
Should tech solutions be designed to be supportive and unobtrusive to human decision-making processes, running in the background of society rather than in the foreground?