PhD defence by Sonja Rattay

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Title

"You are doing it wrong" - The Trouble with Ethics in Practice for Designing AI

Abstract

Ethics in the design of technology has a long history of debate, that periodically surfaces with more urgency than at other times. The fast progression of development and deployment of AI systems in the last years is one of such times. As a result, conversations around ethics have spread beyond the field of moral philosophy, and the disciplines of HCI, computer science, data science and engineering are working towards creating generally applicable forms of applied ethics for the field. Of course, many controversies remain, and debates around what such applied ethics might look like touch on broad political and economical tensions, with plenty of critical studies highlighting the interconnectedness of technological progress and social issues.

In this thesis, I examine such tensions from the perspective of practice of designing technology, with particular consideration of relational aspects of ethics and the social dimensions informing the envisioning and making of technology. Ethics in this framing is considered as the ongoing process of making decisions based on moral judgements. My work takes this examination beyond the exploration of normative judgements and prescriptive guidelines, into the fields of envisioned futures, and affective experiences of moral tensions and value trade offs.

Supervisors

Principal Supervisor Irina Shklovski
Co-Supervisor Jens-Erik Mai
Co-Supervisor Marco Rozendaal

Assessment Committee

Professor Pernille Bjørn, DIKU
Associate Professor Lilly Irani, University of California, San Diego
Professor Kristina Höök, KTH

Moderator: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor Teresa Hirzle, DIKU

For an electronic copy of the thesis, please visit the PhD Programme page.