This Open Access book shows how value sensitive design (VSD), responsible innovation, and comprehensive engineering can guide the rapid development of technological responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Responding to the ethical challenges of data-driven technologies and other tools requires thinking about values in the context of a pandemic as well as in a post-COVID world. Instilling values must be prioritized from the beginning, not only in the emergency response to the pandemic, but in how to proceed with new societal precedents materializing, new norms of health surveillance, and new public health requirements.
The contributors with expertise in VSD bridge the gap between ethical acceptability and social acceptance. By addressing ethical acceptability and societal acceptance together, VSD guides COVID-technologies in a way that strengthens their ability to fight the virus, and outlines pathways for the resolution of moral dilemmas. This volume provides diachronic reflections on the crisis response to address long-term moral consequences in light of the post-pandemic future. Both contact-tracing apps and immunity passports must work in a multi-system environment, and will be required to succeed alongside institutions, incentive structures, regulatory bodies, and current legislation. This text appeals to students, researchers and importantly, professionals in the field.
Matthew J. Dennis
Matthew J. Dennis is a philosopher of technology, specialising in the ethics of artificial intelligence and persuasive technology. His recent publications focus on how we can live well with emerging technologies (data-driven algorithms, recommender systems, virtual assistants, self-care apps), as well as how our digital well-being is affected by gender, income, and intercultural factors. Recently he has published articles in Journal of Value Inquiry, Philosophy & Technology, Ethics & Information Technology, Science & Engineering Ethics, Journal of Moral Education, and Journal of Social Epistemology. His article, 'Towards a Theory of Digital Well-Being', won the TU/e Postdoctoral Article Prize (2021). He is the co-editor of two topical collections of Ethics and Information Technology (on COVID-19 technologies and on the ethics of algorithmic hiring). Currently, he is a Research Fellow in Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies (ESDiT) at TU Eindhoven (2021–2024) with visiting positions at the University of Oxford's Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence and at University of Amsterdam's Institute for Advanced Studies. Prior to this, he was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at TU Delft (2019–21).
Georgy Ishmaev
Georgy Ishmaev is a postdoctoral researcher at Distributed Systems section of Software Development department of TU Delft. His current areas of research include decentralised systems, data ethics, identity management systems, and privacy. He is also a co-editor for the topical collection of Ethics and Information Technology journal – "Ethics of Information Technology in the COVID-19 Crisis."
Steven Umbrello
Steven Umbrello currently serves as the Managing Director at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (501c3 non-profit, Boston, MA) and a postdoctoral research fellow at TU Delft. He is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Technoethics, the Managing Editor of the Journal of Responsible Technology, and the book reviews editor for Prometheus - critical studies in innovation. Currently, his main area of research revolves around Value Sensitive Design (VSD), its philosophical foundation as well as its potential application to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and Industry 4.0
Jeroen van den Hoven
Jeroen van den Hoven is university professor and full professor of Ethics and Technology at Delft University of Technology and editor in chief of Ethics and Information Technology. He is currently the scientific director of the Delft Design for Values Institute. He was the founding scientific director of 4TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology (2007-2013). In 2009, he won the World Technology Award for Ethics as well as the IFIP prize for ICT and Society for his work in Ethics and ICT. Jeroen van den Hoven was founder, and until 2016 Programme Chair, of the program of the Dutch Research Council on Responsible Innovation. He published Designing in Ethics (Van den Hoven, Miller & Pogge eds., Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Evil Online (Cocking & Van den Hoven, Blackwell, 2018) He is a permanent member of the European Group on Ethics (EGE) to the European Commission. In 2017 he was knighted in the Order of the Lion of The Netherlands.
