Whom and what can you trust in online / mediated environments? Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Philosophy, Computer Science, Media Studies

James Moor¹s seminal paper, ³What is Computer Ethics?² (1985), inaugurated a new generation of interdisciplinary reflection on how computing technologies evoked distinctive new ethical challenges.  These challenges are often quite novel ­ and their roots in specific technologies thus require equally novel and collaborative reflection across the otherwise diverse disciplines of philosophy, applied ethics, computer science, social science, and so on.

Especially over the past decade, increasing attention has been given to questions of trust and privacy in online and mediated environments.  These questions are complicated by important differences between face-to-face and online/mediated experiences of trust and privacy - and further complicated by the increasingly important roles of Artificial Agents (AAs) and Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) such as those at work in ³recommendations for you² on commercial websites, web-page ranking algorithms used in popular search engines, and so on. At the same time, AAs and MASs are becoming increasingly autonomous ­ capable of making decisions independently of human control. Such autonomy raises centrally philosophical questions:  Are such AAs and MASs further capable of making autonomous ethical judgments ­including the specific sort of judgment denoted by phronesis or ³practical wisdom²?  And: how would we know if we can or should trust these agents ­precisely as they become increasingly indispensible to our lives?

Our lecturers / mentors have each undertaken leading work in these domains, both within philosophically-grounded and -oriented reflection (J. Moor, J. Simon, M. Taddeo, H. Tavani) and within the contexts of online and mediated communication environments (D. Elgesem, E. Staksrud, C.Ess). Our faculty and PhD workshops are designed to further important dialogue and debate, and foster current doctoral research in these domains. The public debate will offer highlights of current insights and findings, along with critical discussion of our defining themes and questions.

For more details, including registration procedures, please see the workshops / lecture website.