This paper argues that instituting Citizen Boards of Governance (CBGs) is the optimal strategy to democratically contain Big Tech’s algorithmic powers in the digital public sphere. CBGs are bodies of randomly selected citizens that are authorized to govern the algorithmic infrastructure of Big Tech platforms. The main advantage of CBGs is to tackle the concentrated powers of private tech corporations without giving too much power to governments. I show why this is a better approach than ordinary state (...) regulation or relying on market mechanisms. My proposal follows from the critique of Big Tech’s concentrated powers, and explains how this justifies democratizing algorithms in the digital public sphere. My approach thus speaks to a core commitment in democratic theory: enhancing the autonomy of the public sphere from the centers of powers in modern societies, be it corporations or governments. (shrink)

The pervasiveness of AI-empowered technologies across multiple sectors has led to drastic changes concerning traditional social practices and how we relate to one another. Moreover, market-driven Big Tech corporations are now entering public domains, and concerns have been raised that they may even influence public agenda and research. Therefore, this chapter focuses on assessing and evaluating what kind of business model is desirable to incentivise the AI for Social Good (AI4SG) factors. In particular, the chapter explores the implications of (...) this discourse for SDG #17 (global partnership) and how this goal may encourage Big Tech corporations to strengthen multi-stakeholder partnerships that promote effective public-private and civil society partnerships and the meaningful co-presence of non-market and market values. In doing so, the chapter proposes an analysis of the sociological notion of "social license to operate" (SLO) elaborated in the mining and extractive industry literature and introduces it into the discourse on sustainable digital business models and responsible management of risks in the digital age. This serves to explore how such a social license can be adopted as a practice by digital business models to foster trust, collaboration and coordination among different actors - AI researchers and initiatives, institutions and civil society at large - for the support of SDGs interrelated targets and goals. (shrink)

Sustainability is typically viewed as consisting of three forces, economic, social, and ecological, in tension with one another. In this paper, we address the dangers posed to societal sustainability. The concern being addressed is the very survival of societies where the rights of individuals, personal and collective freedoms, an independent judiciary and media, and democracy, despite its messiness, are highly valued. We argue that, as a result of various technological innovations, a range of dysfunctional impacts are threatening social and political (...) stability. For instance, robotics and automation are replacing human labor and decision-making in a range of industries; search engines, monetized through advertising, have access to, and track, our interests and preferences; social media, in connecting us to one another often know more about us than we ourselves do, enabling them to profit in ways which may not coincide with our well-being; online retailers have not only acquired the ability to track and predict our buying choices, but also they can squeeze vendors based on their outsize bargaining power; and, in general, virtual technologies have changed both the way we think and our sense of self. With the rising deployment of the Internet of Things, and developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, the threats to individual freedoms and rights, societal cohesion and harmony, employment and economic well-being, and trust in democracy are being ratcheted up. This paper lauds the benefits and addresses the harm wrought by the high tech giants in Information and Communication Technologies. The search for rapidly growing revenues drives firms to accelerate product innovation without fully investigating the entire gamut of their impacts. As greater wealth accrues to the leaders of tech firms, inequalities within firms and societies are widening, creating social tensions and political ferment. We explore the ethical nature of the challenge employing a simple utilitarian calculus, complemented by approaches rooted in rights, justice, and the common good. Various options to address the challenges posed by ICTs are considered and evaluated. We argue that regulation may do little more than slow down the damage to society, particularly since societal values and political preferences vary internationally. Firms need to establish ethical standards, imbuing the upholders of these standards with sufficient authority, while creating a culture of morality. User involvement and activism, and shareholders’ concerns for the sustainability of societies on whose continued prosperity they depend, are imperative to humanity’s ability to decide the future direction of technology. (shrink)

The past few years have seen the opening of several antitrust investigations against some of the most dominant and powerful companies in the world—e.g., the U.S. Department of Justice, numerous states, and the Federal Trade Commission have sued Google, Facebook, and Amazon, and the E.U. has launched additional proceedings against Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. This paper looks at the latest trends and developments in the E.U. and the USA and analyzes the different regulatory approaches taken from a distinct business (...) ethics, that is, ordoliberal perspective. The paper aims to derive ordoliberal-inspired antitrust principles and apply them to the current antitrust proceedings and investigations, thereby assessing their strengths and weaknesses. It also aims at developing ordoliberal-inspired reform proposals which might help to strengthen and “harden” modern-day antitrust regimes. (shrink)

The emergence of a global industry of digital health platforms operated by Big Tech corporations, and its growing entanglements with academic and pharmaceutical research networks, raise pressing questions on the capacity of current data governance models, regulatory and legal frameworks to safeguard the sustainability of the health research ecosystem. In this article, we direct our attention toward the challenges faced by the European General Data Protection Regulation in regulating the potentially disruptive engagement of Big Tech platforms in health (...) research. The General Data Protection Regulation upholds a rather flexible regime for scientific research through a number of derogations to otherwise stricter data protection requirements, while providing a very broad interpretation of the notion of “scientific research”. Precisely the breadth of these exemptions combined with the ample scope of this notion could provide unintended leeway to the health data processing activities of Big Tech platforms, which have not been immune from carrying out privacy-infringing and socially disruptive practices in the health domain. We thus discuss further finer-grained demarcations to be traced within the broadly construed notion of scientific research, geared to implementing use-based data governance frameworks that distinguish health research activities that should benefit from a facilitated data protection regime from those that should not. We conclude that a “re-purposing” of big data governance approaches in health research is needed if European nations are to promote research activities within a framework of high safeguards for both individual citizens and society. (shrink)

The debate surrounding ‘big tech’ and antitrust has dominated public policy discourses over the past few years in many parts of the world. Noteworthy is that several countries and regions, including China, the European Union, and the United States, have launched investigations into the allegedly anticompetitive and exclusionary business practices of companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google and their Chinese counterparts, Alibaba and Tencent. This paper builds on the renewed interest in the topic and discusses in detail (...) – and from an ordoliberal perspective – the key characteristics of the digital economy, the business conduct of tech platforms, and the corresponding antitrust concerns, as well as possible reform steps which could help to strengthen modern-day competition law and policy (and antitrust enforcement). (shrink)

Despite increasing attention to the sensors, drones, robots, and apps permeating agri-food systems, little attention has been paid to social media, perhaps the most ubiquitous digital technology in rural areas globally. This article draws on analysis of farming groups on Myanmar Facebook to posit social media as appropriated agritech: a generic technology incorporated into existing circuits of economic and social exchange that becomes a site of agrarian innovation. Through analysis of an original archive of popular posts collected from Myanmar-language Facebook (...) pages and groups related to agriculture, I explore the ways that farmers, traders, agronomists and agricultural companies use social media to further agrarian commerce and knowledge. These activities evidence that farmers use Facebook not only to exchange market or planting information, but also to interact in ways structured by existing social, political and economic relations. More broadly, my analysis builds on insights from STS and postcolonial computing to disrupt assumptions about the totalizing power of digital technologies and affirm the relevance of social media to agriculture, while inviting new research into the surprising, ambiguous relationships between small farmers and big tech. (shrink)

Digital personal data is increasingly framed as the basis of contemporary economies, representing an important new asset class. Control over these data assets seems to explain the emergence and dominance of so-called “Big Tech” firms, consisting of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google/alphabet, and Facebook. These US-based firms are some of the largest in the world by market capitalization, a position that they retain despite growing policy and public condemnation—or “techlash”—of their market power based on their monopolistic control of personal data. (...) We analyse the transformation of personal data into an asset in order to explore how personal data is accounted for, governed, and valued by Big Tech firms and other political-economic actors. However, our findings show that Big Tech firms turn “users” and “user engagement” into assets through the performative measurement, governance, and valuation of user metrics, rather than extending ownership and control rights over personal data per se. We conceptualize this strategy as a form of “techcraft” to center attention on the means and mechanisms that Big Tech firms deploy to make users and user data measurable and legible as future revenue streams. (shrink)

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, governments have turned their attention to digital contact tracing. In many countries, public debate has focused on the risks this technology poses to privacy, with advocates and experts sounding alarm bells about surveillance and mission creep reminiscent of the post 9/11 era. Yet, when Apple and Google launched their contact tracing API in April 2020, some of the world’s leading privacy experts applauded this initiative for its privacy-preserving technical specifications. In an interesting twist, the (...) class='Hi'>tech giants came to be portrayed as greater champions of privacy than some democratic governments. This article proposes to view the Apple/Google API in terms of a broader phenomenon whereby tech corporations are encroaching into ever new spheres of social life. From this perspective, the advantage these actors have accrued in the sphere of the production of digital goods provides them with access to the spheres of health and medicine, and more worrisome, to the sphere of politics. These sphere transgressions raise numerous risks that are not captured by the focus on privacy harms. Namely, a crowding out of essential spherical expertise, new dependencies on corporate actors for the delivery of essential, public goods, the shaping of public policy by non-representative, private actors and ultimately, the accumulation of decision-making power across multiple spheres. While privacy is certainly an important value, its centrality in the debate on digital contact tracing may blind us to these broader societal harms and unwittingly pave the way for ever more sphere transgressions. (shrink)

This article discusses the political economy of AI capitalism. It considers AI as a General Purpose Technology and argues we need to investigate the power concentration of Big Tech. AI capitalism is characterised by the commodification of data, data extraction and a concentration in hiring of AI talent and compute capacity. This is behind Big Tech’s unstoppable drive for growth, which leads to monopolisation and enclosure under the winner takes all principle. If we consider AI as a GPT—technologies (...) that alter society’s economic and social structures—we need to come up with alternatives in terms of ownership and governance. The commons is proposed as an alternative for thinking about how to organise AI development and how to distribute the value that can be derived from it. Using the commons framework is also a way of giving society a more prominent role in the debate about what we expect from AI and how we should approach it. (shrink)

Having been involved in a slew of recent scandals, many of the world’s largest technology companies embarked on devising numerous codes of ethics, intended to promote improved standards in the conduct of their business. These efforts have attracted largely critical interdisciplinary academic attention. The critics have identified the voluntary character of the industry ethics codes as among the main obstacles to their efficacy. This is because individual industry leaders and employees, flawed human beings that they are, cannot be relied on (...) voluntarily to conform with what justice demands, especially when faced with powerful incentives to pursue their own self-interest instead. Consequently, the critics have recommended a suite of laws and regulations to force the tech companies to better comply with the requirements of justice. At the same time, they have paid little attention to the possibility that individuals acting within the political context, e.g. as lawmakers and regulators, are also imperfect and need not be wholly compliant with what justice demands. This paper argues that such an omission is far from trivial. It creates a heavy argumentative burden on the part of the critics that they by and large fail to discharge. As a result, the case for Big Tech regulation that emerges from the recent literature has substantial lacunae and more work needs to be done before we can accept the critics’ calls for greater state involvement in the industry. (shrink)

Having been involved in a slew of recent scandals, many of the world’s largest technology companies (“Big Tech,” “Digital Titans”) embarked on devising numerous codes of ethics, intended to promote improved standards in the conduct of their business. These efforts have attracted largely critical interdisciplinary academic attention. The critics have identified the voluntary character of the industry ethics codes as among the main obstacles to their efficacy. This is because individual industry leaders and employees, flawed human beings that they (...) are, cannot be relied on voluntarily to conform with what justice demands, especially when faced with powerful incentives to pursue their own self-interest instead. Consequently, the critics have recommended a suite of laws and regulations to force the tech companies to better comply with the requirements of justice. At the same time, they have paid little attention to the possibility that individuals acting within the political context, e.g. as lawmakers and regulators, are also imperfect and need not be wholly compliant with what justice demands. This paper argues that such an omission is far from trivial. It creates a heavy argumentative burden on the part of the critics that they by and large fail to discharge. As a result, the case for Big Tech regulation that emerges from the recent literature has substantial lacunae and more work needs to be done before we can accept the critics’ calls for greater state involvement in the industry. (shrink)

Since March of 2020, the world has been brought to its knees by unscientific and unethical mandates. These mandates have destroyed the world economy and the lives of countless innocent individuals. The “cure” that has been offered by medical bureaucrats and politicians has been more deadly than the disease (COVID-19). The imposition of ludicrous lockdowns, mask-wearing, coerced vaccination, and vaccine passports have not only proved to be ineffective, but also much more harmful than SARS-CoV-2 and all its variants. COVID-19 has (...) a recovery rate of close to 99% for most of the world’s population, however, despite this, institutions and power-hungry individuals have trampled upon our civil liberties and ignored our inalienable human rights. It is precisely as Thomas Paine famously stated: “The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.” -/- Many lives have been gratuitously lost because of the administration of deadly medical treatments, and the rejection of effective treatments that follow genuine science. In the process, informed consent has been disparaged and desecrated. For over two years, we were instructed to “trust the science,” but the “science” advocated by medical bureaucrats and greedy politicians was the reason why the world was turned upside-down. In the face of these crimes against humanity, justice will only be brought by real courts and real judges, but this will require the awakening of a critical mass. This book serves as an instrument for this awakening. (shrink)

The authors offer their sincere thanks to all of the commentators for taking the time to comment on our work ; one of the advantages of the AJOB format is immediate feedback,...

At present, high-tech enterprises are mainly organizations engaged in the production, research, and development and service of high-tech products. The current development of high-tech industries in various countries in the world is of great significance to improving social productivity and overall national strength. This article mainly introduces the modeling and analysis of the complex system of human capital accumulation in high-tech enterprises based on big data. This paper proposes a theoretical analysis of corporate human capital data (...) and proposes regression analysis and analytic hierarchy process to calculate and analyze the process of corporate human capital accumulation and collect and analyze the data using questionnaire surveys and other methods. In addition, complex systems were modeled based on big data, and a cloud computing-based human capital big data analysis platform was established. The experimental results show that complex system modeling based on big data has a positive impact on the human capital accumulation of high-tech enterprises. For high-tech companies at different stages of development, the relationship between various types of human capital and corporate performance is inconsistent with the market economy. In contrast, the current salary system of some high-tech companies still has many drawbacks. The cost of using human resources controlled by the wage system accounts for more than 24%. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the epistemological tensions embedded within big data and data-driven technologies to advance a socio-political reconsideration of the public dimension in the assessment of their implementation. Design/methodology/approach This paper builds upon (and revisits) the European Union’s (EU) normative understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven technologies, blending reflections rooted in philosophy of technology with issues of democratic participation in tech-related matters. Findings This paper proposes the conceptual design of sectorial and/or local-level (...) e-participation platforms to ignite an ongoing discussion – involving experts, private actors, as well as cognizant citizens – over the implementation of data-driven technologies, to avoid siloed, tech-solutionist decisions. Originality/value This paper inscribes the EU’s normative approach to AI and data-driven technologies, as well as critical work on the governance of these technologies, into a broader political dimension, suggesting a way to democratically and epistocratically opening up the decisional processes over the development and implementation of these technologies and turn such processes into a systemic civic involvement. (shrink)

The emergence of urban tech economies calls attention to the multidimensional spatiality of ecosystems made up of people and organizations that produce new digital technology. Since the economic crisis of 2008, city governments have aggressively pursued economic growth by nurturing these ecosystems. Elected officials create public-private-nonprofit partnerships to build an “innovation complex” of discursive, organizational, and geographical spaces; they aim not only to jump-start economic growth but to remake the city for a new modernity. But it is difficult to (...) insert tech production space into the complicated urban matrix. Embedded industries and social communities want protection from expanding tech companies and the real estate developers who build for them. City council members, state legislators, and community organizations oppose the city government’s attempts to satisfy Big Tech companies. While the city’s density magnifies conflicts of interest over land-use and labor issues, the covid-19 pandemic raises serious questions about the city’s ability to both oppose Big Tech and keep creating tech jobs. (shrink)

“Big ticket” items in medicine pose a moral puzzle. We can call it the “Coby Howard puzzle,” after the boy whose need for an expensive bone marrow transplant forced Oregonians to reassess their policy of prohibiting this and other expensive “big ticket” procedures in favor of more low-tech, apparently cost-efficient interventions. The Oregon rationing debate was stimulated by the concern that expenditures on “big ticket” medical treatments for life-threatening disease were coming at the expense of low-tech, preventive “basic” (...) care like immunizations, wellbaby clinics, and prenatal care.Another recent example was the public controversy over expenditures of over $1,800 per day on a project to try to separate Siamese twins conjoined at the heart. The physicians, prior to the procedure, claimed there was a one percent chance of success. It was reported that 50,000 children in Philadelphia could be immunized at the cost of that innovative therapy. Cost-benefit analysis suggests that much greater good would be done in the long run if we ignored the expensive, long-shot, high-risk projects and focused on basic medical needs. (shrink)

“Big ticket” items in medicine pose a moral puzzle. We can call it the “Coby Howard puzzle,” after the boy whose need for an expensive bone marrow transplant forced Oregonians to reassess their policy of prohibiting this and other expensive “big ticket” procedures in favor of more low-tech, apparently cost-efficient interventions. The Oregon rationing debate was stimulated by the concern that expenditures on “big ticket” medical treatments for life-threatening disease were coming at the expense of low-tech, preventive “basic” (...) care like immunizations, wellbaby clinics, and prenatal care.Another recent example was the public controversy over expenditures of over $1,800 per day on a project to try to separate Siamese twins conjoined at the heart. The physicians, prior to the procedure, claimed there was a one percent chance of success. It was reported that 50,000 children in Philadelphia could be immunized at the cost of that innovative therapy. Cost-benefit analysis suggests that much greater good would be done in the long run if we ignored the expensive, long-shot, high-risk projects and focused on basic medical needs. (shrink)

Internet of Things, Internet of Everything and Internet of People are concepts suggesting that objects, devices, and people will be increasingly interconnected through digital infrastructure that will generate a growing gathering of data. Parallel to this development is the celebration of the smart city and sharing city as urban policy visions that by relying heavily on new technologies bear the promise of efficient and thriving cities. Law and policy scholarship have either focused on questions related to privacy, discrimination, security, or (...) issues related to the production and use of big data, digital public services. Little or no attention has been paid to the disruptive impact of technological development on urban governance and city inhabitants’ rights of equal access, participation, management and even ownership, in order to understand whether and how technology can also enhance the protection of human rights and social justice in the city. This Article proposes complementing the technological and digital infrastructure with a legal and governance infrastructure, the Internet of Humans, by construing and injecting in the policy framework of the city the principle of Tech Justice. Building on a literature review and from an analysis of selected case studies, this Article stresses the dichotomy existing between the market-based and the society-based applications of technology, the first likely to increase the digital divide and the challenges to human rights in the city, the latter bearing the promise to promote equal access to technology in the city. The main argument advanced by this Article is that the principle of Tech Justice if embedded as an empirical dimension of smart city and sharing city policies can steer their developments in the direction of a more just and democratic city. (shrink)

In 2010, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research started a series of citizens’ dialogues on future technologies. In the context of the German history of public participation in technology-oriented policy making, these dialogues are unique for at least two reasons: The Federal Ministry retains the responsibility for the entire process and is heavily involved in its planning, organization and communication, and the number of participants and process elements is significantly higher than in most other participative events. The paper (...) presents insights into the political background of the citizens’ dialogues, its general concept as well as first observations from the dialogue rounds on energy and high-tech medicine. In addition, it discusses reactions of other political actors and expectations regarding legitimacy and representativeness of the dialogue results. (shrink)

Dominant forms of contemporary big-data based digital citizen science do not question the institutional divide between qualified experts and lay-persons. In our paper, we turn to the historical case of a large-scale amateur project on biogeographical birdwatching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to show that networked amateur research can operate in a more autonomous mode. This mode depends on certain cultural values, the constitution of specific knowledge objects, and the design of self-governed infrastructures. We conclude by arguing (...) that the contemporary quest for autonomous citizen science is part of a broader discourse on the autonomy of scientific research in general. Just as the actors in our historical case positioned themselves against the elitism of gentlemen scientists, avant-garde groups of the twenty first century like biohackers and civic tech enthusiasts position themselves against the system of professional science—while “digital citizen science” remains to oscillate between claims for autonomy and realities of heteronomy, constantly reaffirming the classic lay-expert divide. (shrink)

This article provides an account of the ethical issues that arise when digital technologies and online spaces are structured by Big Data algorithms. We show that although the uses of Big Data may be new, traditional theological and ethical categories are still applicable, including “the sins of the fathers” from hamartiology and the scholastic concept of haecceity. Using these resources, we map the overall ecosystem in which digital technologies are developed and used, identifying the relationships between the individuals and organizations (...) involved. We show how these relationships are often characterized by various kinds of harm. We then argue for a reorientation of the tech ecosystem toward co‐liberation—and ultimately, joy. (shrink)

The book focuses on two pillars of China's economic success: industrial enterprises and the national system of innovation. The first part investigates the nature and evolution of productive enterprises, concentrating on the rounds of transformation of their ownership structure. The second part analyses the structure of China's national innovation systems. The analysis is based on a thorough study of statistical data provided by the China Statistical Yearbook, the World Bank and other sources. Alberto Gabriele emphasizes two key points, which constitute (...) a partly novel interpretation of two aspects of China's unique development. The first point is the crucial role of public ownership of the country's core means of production, in the framework of a harmonious market where different types of property coexist. China, the author argues, gradually abandoned old-fashioned administrative command tools and is relying more and more on indirect and value-based forms of strategic control of productive assets. The second point is China's strategic emphasis on technological progress and innovation, accompanied by an effort to develop national capacity and reduce its dependence on other countries. China's drive to become a first-class technological power revolves around the enhancement of its national innovation system, the author says. Big private high-tech companies play a crucial role; however, the main engines of progress are state-controlled enterprises, universities and research centres. (shrink)

In 2010, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research started a series of citizens’ dialogues on future technologies. In the context of the German history of public participation in technology-oriented policy making, these dialogues are unique for at least two reasons: The Federal Ministry retains the responsibility for the entire process and is heavily involved in its planning, organization and communication, and the number of participants and process elements is significantly higher than in most other participative events. The paper (...) presents insights into the political background of the citizens’ dialogues, its general concept as well as first observations from the dialogue rounds on energy and high-tech medicine. In addition, it discusses reactions of other political actors and expectations regarding legitimacy and representativeness of the dialogue results. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that it is impossible to trust the Big Tech companies, in an ethically important sense of trust. The argument is not that these companies are untrustworthy. Rather, I argue that the power to hold the trustee accountable is a necessary component of this sense of trust, and, because these companies are so powerful, they are immune to our attempts, as individuals or nation-states, to hold them to account. It is, therefore, literally impossible to trust (...) Big Tech. After introducing the accounts of trust and power that I deploy, I argue that Big Tech companies have four kinds of power that render them unaccountable: fiscal power, political power, data power, and cognitive power. I conclude by reflecting on recent calls to break up the Big Tech firms, suggesting a new antitrust test in the light of my arguments. (shrink)

Zentrale Denkfiguren der von Wolfgang Klafki begründeten kritisch-konstruktiven Erziehungswissenschaft werden in diesem Buch aufgegriffen und in ihrem Innovationswert für die wissenschaftliche Pädagogik reflektiert. Namhafte Autorinnen und Autoren unterschiedlicher Subdisziplinen und Generationen vertiefen Klafkis Ansatz theoretisch wie methodisch und öffnen Problemstellungen, die bisher nicht bearbeitet worden sind.

Mobile applications are increasingly regarded as important tools for an integrated strategy of infection containment in post-lockdown societies around the globe. This paper discusses a number of questions that should be addressed when assessing the ethical challenges of mobile applications for digital contact-tracing of COVID-19: Which safeguards should be designed in the technology? Who should access data? What is a legitimate role for “Big Tech” companies in the development and implementation of these systems? How should cultural and behavioural issues (...) be accounted for in the design of these apps? Should use of these apps be compulsory? What does transparency and ethical oversight mean in this context? We demonstrate that responses to these questions are complex and contingent and argue that if digital contract-tracing is used, then it should be clear that this is on a trial basis and its use should be subject to independent monitoring and evaluation. (shrink)

La arquitectura digital ha alterado de manera decisiva la sociedad y, en consecuencia, demanda respuestas legales. De la Internet desarrollada en la década de 1970 con fines militares, casi nada permanece igual. La plataforma ha otorgado un poder sin igual a las empresas de tecnología, cambiando la forma en que nos comunicamos, abordamos la política, negociamos y también cómo nos relacionamos. En la economía digital actual, la atención de los usuarios es el principal producto, y estos usuarios también son productores (...) de contenido. En este modelo, se facilita la propagación de información falsa, lo que pone en riesgo la democracia y la ciencia. Para abordar estos fenómenos, es fundamental desarrollar y aplicar mecanismos adecuados de regulación de las plataformas para proteger a la sociedad y la libertad. Este estudio se basa en este contexto para analizar algunas respuestas regulatorias que se están debatiendo en Brasil. (shrink)

This article examines discourses about mixed reality as a data-rich sensing technology – specifically, engaging with discourses of time as framed by developers, engineers and in corporate PR and marketing in a range of public facing materials. We focus on four main settings in which mixed reality is imagined to be used, and in which time was a dominant discursive theme – the development of mixed reality by big tech companies, the use of mixed reality for defence, mixed reality (...) as a technology for control of populations in civil society and mixed reality as a technology used in workplace settings. Across these settings, the broad narrative is that mixed reality technologies afford overwhelmingly positive benefits like efficiency and security through their capture, relay and rendition of data – affording a form of anticipatory power to the user. The framing of temporality, we argue, is underlain by social and political values, which represent certain interests, but leave others out in the imagination of mixed reality's technological advance. (shrink)

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme Technology, Megatrends and Work. Of all the profound changes in business, technology is perhaps the most ubiquitous. There is not a facet of our lives unaffected by internet technologies and artificial intelligence. The Journal (...) of Business Ethics established a dedicated section that focuses on Technology and Business Ethics, yet issues related to this phenomenon run right through all the sections. Kirsten Martin, editor of the Technology and Business Ethics section, joins our interim social media editor, Hannah Trittin-UIbrich, to advance a human-centric approach to the development and application of digital technologies that places Business Ethics at centre of the analysis. For Shuili Du, technology is the defining condition for a new era of Corporate Social Responsibility—CSR 3.0—which she defines as “a company’s socially responsible strategies and practices that deal with key ethical and socio-technical issues associated with AI and related technologies on the one hand and leverage the power of AI and related technologies to tackle social and environmental problems on the other hand.” It is not just technologies that are a determining feature of our lives but technology companies, an argument made by Glen Whelan as he examines Big Business and the need for a Big Business Ethics as we try to understand the impact of Big Tech on our post-work world. Indeed, as noted by Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz, megatrends in addition to advancement in technologies, namely globalization, the greening of economies, and changes in demographics and migration, are shaping the future for workers in ways previously unimaginable. Contributing to this important debate, Praveen Parboteeah considers the influence of another longstanding but oft overlooked megatrend, the role of religion in the workplace. Given the enormity of the influence of technology and other megatrends in our world, it is not surprising that this essay introduces ground-breaking ideas that speak to the future of business ethics research. (shrink)

This paper, based on an invited Thesis Eleven presentation, provides a ‘map of technopolitics’ that springs from an investigation of the theoretical notion of technological convergence adopted by the US National Science Foundation, signaling a new paradigm of ‘nano-bio-info-cogno’ technologies. This integration at the nano-level is expected to drive the next wave of scientific research, technology and knowledge economy. The paper explores the concept of ‘technopolitics’ by investigating the links between Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism and Lyotard’s ‘technoscience’, reviewing the history of the (...) notion in the work of the Belgium philosopher Gilbert Hottois. The ‘deep convergence’ representing a new technoscientific synergy is the product of long-term trends of ‘bioinformational capitalism’ that harnesses the twin forces of information and genetic sciences that coalesce in the least mature ‘cognosciences’ in their application to education and research. The map of technopolitics systematically identifies the political relations between Big Tech and ‘new digital publics’ to reveal that the new paradigm is based on the supreme value of cognitive efficiency. There are a closely-knit cluster of concerns that frame a map of political issues about the fifth-generation technological impacts on human beings, their bodies and minds, and public institutions, not least the logic of the distribution and ownership of data, information and knowledge, and its effects on democracy. (shrink)

Digital innovations are rapidly changing the contemporary workplace. Big Tech companies marketing algorithmic management increasingly decide on the Future of Work. Political responses, however, often focus on managing the impact of these technologies on workers. They leave the question of how these technologies are designed or how workers can determine their own futures unanswered. This approach risks surrendering the Future of Work debate to techno-determinist imaginaries aligned with corporate interests. Using Cornelius Castoriadis’ early writings on worker struggles in French (...) Tayloristic factories and his later oeuvre on conflictual social imaginaries, I propose an agonistic approach to the Future of Work. Not merely companies implementing workplace technologies, but also workers themselves possess agency in determining the Future of Work. Workers’ frequent contestations against machinic surveillance and technologically mediated coordination of the labour process disclose an alternative Future of Work in which technologies are used to enhance worker autonomy rather than bureaucratic control. Worker struggles at Amazon Mechanical Turk illustrate this agonistic dynamic: Amazon mobilizes algorithmic management to fragment and control a workforce of globally dispersed remote workers, but the latter form online social communities and create counter-technologies to reappropriate control over the labour process. (shrink)

In the light of several ongoing antitrust investigations in the E.U. and the U.S., the following research paper analyzes whether ‘big tech’ – same as the big banks – need special regulatory (and economic -political) attention and if so, how an updated form of regulatory policy for the digital era could look like. It does so by utilizing – and reviving – the normative and business -ethical ideals of German ‘neoliberalism’, also known as (classical) ordoliberalism. Especially, Walter Eucken’s work (...) has the potential to inform and enrich the current debate concerning the regulation of big tech. The main goal of the paper is to outline a potentially new regulatory framework – one that combines (and revises) Eucken’s ordoliberalism with the competition policy of the European Union. (shrink)

In recent years, AI research has become more and more computationally demanding. In natural language processing, this tendency is reflected in the emergence of large language models like GPT-3. These powerful neural network-based models can be used for a range of NLP tasks and their language generation capacities have become so sophisticated that it can be very difficult to distinguish their outputs from human language. LLMs have raised concerns over their demonstrable biases, heavy environmental footprints, and future social ramifications. In (...) December 2020, critical research on LLMs led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, co-lead of the company’s AI Ethics team, which sparked a major public controversy around LLMs and the growing corporate influence over AI research. This article explores the role LLMs play in the political economy of AI as infrastructural components for AI research and development. Retracing the technical developments that have led to the emergence of LLMs, we point out how they are intertwined with the business model of big tech companies and further shift power relations in their favour. This becomes visible through the Transformer, which is the underlying architecture of most LLMs today and started the race for ever bigger models when it was introduced by Google in 2017. Using the example of GPT-3, we shed light on recent corporate efforts to commodify LLMs through paid API access and exclusive licensing, raising questions around monopolization and dependency in a field that is increasingly divided by access to large-scale computing power. (shrink)

AI ethics is proposed, by the Big Tech companies which lead AI research and development, as the cure for diverse social problems posed by the commercialization of data-intensive technologies. It aims to reconcile capitalist AI production with ethics. However, AI ethics is itself now the subject of wide criticism; most notably, it is accused of being no more than “ethics washing” a cynical means of dissimulation for Big Tech, while it continues its business operations unchanged. This paper aims (...) to critically assess, and go beyond the ethics washing thesis. I argue that AI ethics is indeed ethics washing, but not only that. It has a more significant economic function for Big Tech. To make this argument I draw on the theory of intellectual monopoly capital. I argue that ethics washing is better understood as a subordinated innovation network: a dispersed network of contributors beyond Big Tech’s formal employment whose research is indirectly planned by Big Tech, which also appropriates its results. These results are not intended to render AI more ethical, but rather to advance the business processes of data-intensive capital. Because the parameters of AI ethics are indirectly set in advance by Big tech, the ostensible goal that AI ethics sets for itself—to resolve the contradiction between business and ethics—is in fact insoluble. I demonstrate this via an analysis of the latest trend in AI ethics: the operationalization of ethical principles. (shrink)

Fugitive Politics explores the intersection between politics and ecology, between the requirements for radical change and the unprecedented challenges posed by the global crisis, a dialectic has rarely been addressed in academia. Across eight chapters, Carl Boggs explores how systemic change may be achieved within the current system, while detailing attempts at achieving change within nation states. Boggs states that any notion of revolution seems fanciful in the current climate, contending that controlling elites have concentrated their hold on corporate power (...) along three self-serving fronts: technology (Big Tech) and the surveillance order, militarism and the warfare state, intensification of globalized power. Combined with this Boggs cites the fundamental absence of revolutionary counter-forces, arguing that after decades of subservice relevant, allied to the rise of identity politics and social movements, the Marxist theoretical legacy is now exhausted, and will not provide an exit from the crisis. Boggs concludes that the only possibility for fundamental change will come from an open style of politics, in the Jacobin tradition, operating within the overall structures of the current democratic state. Written for both an academic and general readership, in the US and beyond, Fugitive Politics will be of vital importance to those studying political theory, political philosophy, political history, Marxism and Marxist theory, authoritarian politics, ecology, environmental politics, and climate politics. (shrink)

The social impacts of computer technology are often glorified in public discourse, but there is growing concern about its actual effects on society. In this article, we ask: how does “consent” as an analytical framework make visible the social dynamics and power relations in the capture, extraction, and labor of data science knowledge production? We hypothesize that a form of boundary violation in data science workplaces—gender harassment—may correlate with the ways humans’ lived experiences are extracted to produce Big Data. The (...) concept of consent offers a useful way to draw comparisons between gender relations in data science and the means by which machines are trained to learn and reason. Inspired by how Big Tech leaders describe unsupervised machine learning, and the co-optation of “revolutionary” rhetoric they use to do so, we introduce a concept we call “techniques of invisibility.” Techniques of invisibility are the ways in which an extreme imbalance between exposure and opacity, demarcated along fault lines of power, are fabricated and maintained, closing down the possibility for bidirectional transparency in the production and applications of algorithms. Further, techniques of invisibility, which we group into two categories—epistemic injustice and the Brotherhood—include acts of subjection by powerful actors in data science designed to quell resistance to exploitative relations. These techniques may be useful in making further connections between epistemic violence, sexism, and surveillance, sussing out persistent boundary violations in data science to render the social in data science visible, and open to scrutiny and debate. (shrink)

Abstract:Although best known to English-speaking readers as the general editor of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, the work of French philologist and philosopher Barbara Cassin is eclectic, encompassing literary studies, ancient philosophy, rhetoric, translation theory, psychoanalysis, politics, and more. From Presocratic philosophy to more recent reflections on Big Tech and democracy, Cassin's work is rooted in "sophistics," an approach that emphasizes the primacy of language in shaping our interactions with the world. Situating this sophistical approach vis-à-vis classical philology (Bollack) and (...) the philosophical tradition (Heidegger, Derrida), this essay explores the contribution of "sophistical reading" to our understanding of philosophical and literary texts. Showing how Cassin uses rhetorical theory to problematize any simple opposition of the latter, the essay concludes with a critical evaluation of Cassin's reading of Helen, Euripides' most sophistical play. (shrink)

This chapter provides an overview of six topics related to governance, ethical, legal, and social implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for sustainable development goals (SDGs) initiatives. We identified six common challenges and related opportunities to mitigate such challenges, as referred to by the authors analysing the chapters provided in the book The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence for the Sustainable Development Goals. They are (1) governance and collaboration, (2) private investments and the role of big tech companies, (3) AI and (...) communities, (4) AI and individuals, (5) jobs and skills, and (6) impact assessment. (shrink)