Introduction
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and digitization are ubiquitous in our society. ICT is also linked with other technologies, such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and neurotechnology. This so-called NBIC convergence has become increasingly visible since the late 1990s. Digitization penetrates every aspect of our lives: the technology nestles itself
in us (for example, through brain implants),
between us (through social media like Facebook), knows more and more
about us (via big data and techniques such as emotion recognition), and is continually learning to behave more
like us (robots and software exhibit intelligent behaviour and can mimic emotions). Van Est (
2014) referred to this as the intimate technological revolution. The digitization of society pushes the boundaries of our abilities and offers all sorts of opportunities, but also challenges our moral boundaries. In this paper we describe what social and ethical issues arise when society becomes digitized on the basis of six dominant technologies: Internet-of-Things, robotics, biometrics, persuasive technology, virtual & augmented reality, and digital platforms.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) and robotics mainly penetrate in our
material world (e.g., the production process, public space, and our home). IoT is based on a worldwide network that integrates the physical world with the virtual world of the Internet. Through the emergence of IoT, we are on the brink of a new era in which objects and people in the material world can be monitored, and where objects and people can exchange information automatically. In this way, the alarm clock does not just wake up a person, but at the same time switches on the coffee machine for making fresh coffee with our breakfast; or the fridge tells us a product has passed its expiry date; or the lighting in the room adjusts itself to what is happening in a video game being played at that moment.
1 Many technology companies predict that IoT will be omnipresent in our daily lives in the future. Many of the technologies we describe in this article are part of IoT: like the augmented-reality glasses which use the Internet to give users real-time additional information about their environment, or a biometric camera which can be linked to an online database to recognize faces. The development of IoT and robotics is strongly linked. Just like IoT devices, robots are mostly equipped with sensors to read their environment; they are increasingly connected to the cloud to share and analyse data, and on the basis of those analyses, carry out independent actions. Although some issues consequently overlap, robotics triggers its own set of specific ethical dilemmas.
Over the past 6 decades the
biological world (e.g., the human body, the brain, and our behaviour) has also been digitized by biometrics and persuasive technology. Biometric information enables the use of unique physical characteristics—such as a person’s face, voice or fingerprint—for verification or identification purposes. An example of verification through biometrics is the electronic border control (e-gates) at airports. The traveller puts their passport on a reader, looks in the camera and the gate then opens or not. The identification system operates as follows: a digital image of the face stored in the passport is compared with the picture of the face taken when the traveller looked in the camera. If the biometric system—in this case a face recognition system—decides that the face stored in the passport is the same person as in the picture, the passport control system concludes they must be the rightful owner of the passport and opens the e-gate. After recognizing and analysing human behaviour, the next step is influencing that behaviour. Persuasive technology is defined by Fogg (
2002) as a technology that aims to encourage people to change their behaviour. To achieve this, there should be the right motivation, the possibility to undertake action and a stimulus that induces certain behaviour. Persuasive technology is, for example, used to persuade a driver to wear a seat belt. Security is the motivation here. By sounding a signal when drivers are not wearing a seat belt, they can be persuaded to actually fasten the belt.
The growing use of ICT also means digitizing the interaction between people, as well as between people and organizations by augmented & virtual reality and digital platforms. So digitization penetrates our
social-cultural world: shopping, transactions, listening to music, contacting friends, taking action and finding a date are things we do increasingly online. The advent of social media and other online services in the late 1990s and at the turn of the century have had a huge impact on the way we communicate. Services have acquired an increasingly important role in our culture and for forming our identity. Our lives are, for example, interwoven with our smartphone, which forms the connection between the real and virtual world. Floridi (
2015) refer to this as
onlife: the distinction between offline and online life is now completely blurred; they have become one. Recent developments in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) also contribute to this fusion. In AR, the real world is mixed with virtual information, animation or objects. In fact an additional digital layer of information is added to our reality, for example, via smart glasses such as Google Glass. With VR, the interaction takes place in a completely virtual, three-dimensional, interactive and computer-generated environment, in which users have an artificial experience. In the future, VR could play an important role in our social lives. It will vastly expand the social media opportunities: people will be able to spend not only time with friends online but also share all kinds of experiences and adventures. Digital platforms enable smart and efficient transactions. Through these digital platforms, radically new organizational forms began to appear after 2010. Examples are Airbnb and Uber that in a few years have become major economic players, drastically disrupting their respective branches. There are plenty of other initiatives particularly in relation to the sharing economy, i.e., the phenomenon that consumers let each other have their unused consumer goods, perhaps for a fee (Frenken and Schor
2017). Another example of a digital platform is blockchain technology. This technology enables the development of so-called autonomous organizations—consisting entirely of bits and bytes. As the technology can automate a series of appointments and tasks, it can therefore take over the function of a certain organization.
Our description is not exhaustive but gives an idea of the various types of societal and ethical issues that arise as a result of digitization. At present, most of the public and political focus is on privacy issues (especially personal data protection) and digital security. The major challenges are the search for digital inviolability of the home and the protection of privacy with the emergence of IoT. We also see a growing focus on issues like justice and the balance of powers. Regarding the former, the focus is on big data, algorithmic profiling, the impact on the right to equal treatment, and presumption of innocence. The dominant position of large internet companies is becoming a hot topic of debate with regard to the balance of powers. Autonomy, human dignity and control of technology are still less popular topics in the public debate and are only being flagged up to a limited extent by social organizations and in policy-making and provision circles. Consequently, these are the areas where we identify blind spots in the governance landscape. We are therefore conducting an ethical technological assessment from the perspective of digitization, and that digitization and the ensuing social and ethical issues will find their way to the social and political agenda.
Our analysis of the scientific literature on technologies revealed several recurring themes: privacy, security, autonomy, justice, human dignity, control of technology, and the balance of powers. We have applied these themes to structure our discussion in this paper. The various ethical and social issues manifest themselves per technology in different ways. Privacy, for example, takes on a whole different meaning in the context of IoT than in the context of biometrics. Not every theme is explored in depth for every development; we focus on the distinctive issues that a particular technology demonstrates within the overarching trend of digitization. Finally, our summary in the conclusion shows which ethical and social issues have explicitly put the new wave of digitization on the map. We briefly indicate how the issues in this paper relate to important values as laid down in international treaties.
The research to describe the ethical and societal issues raised by digitization was done by carrying out a literature review.
2 The scientific literature, mainly, from 2010 was investigated for each area of technology, using search engines such as Google Scholar and Scirus as well as the PiCarta database. Combined with the term for the technology (or related terms and synonyms of this technological field), we entered the following search terms for each area of technology: ethics, ethical, moral, morality, normative, or normativity. Based on the finding publications, we describe the most urgent and problematic ethical and social issues per technology mentioned in the literature. In addition to scientific publications, the desk review included consulting all kinds of newspapers and news sites to illustrate certain issues based on compelling reports in the news.
Conclusion
In this paper, we have described the societal and ethical issues emerging with the digitization of society on the basis of six dominant developing technologies: IoT, robotics, biometrics, persuasive technology, platforms, and augmented & virtual reality. Table
1 summarizes for each overarching theme the discussed societal and ethical issues evoked by these technologies. To underline the importance of these issues, we will briefly discuss the connection with important values set out in international treaties and fundamental rights.
Table 1
Social and ethical issues evoked by digitisation
Privacy | Data protection, spatial privacy, mental privacy, Little Brother, pervasive monitoring, transparency |
Autonomy | Freedom of choice, freedom of expression, manipulation, paternalism, controlling influences |
Safety and security | Safety of information, identity fraud, physical and psychological safety |
Balance of power | Unfair competition, exploitation, relation citizen-government-industry, accountability, control and transparency of algorithms |
Human dignity | Dehumanization, instrumentalization, deskilling (unlearning skills), desocialization |
Justice | Discrimination, exclusion, equal treatment, stigmatization, function creep |
Regulating big data and transparency of algorithms
The digitization of our material, biological and socio-cultural world leads to an ever-expanding digital world of data. In that digital world, the data which is processed and analysed forms the basis for people as well as automated systems to make decisions that subsequently have an impact on the physical world. For all kinds of essential services and products, we make increasingly more use of digital technologies and we are becoming increasingly more dependent on digital systems: in healthcare, banking, media, education or the justice system. The digitization of society is entering a new phase, and has blurred the distinction between online and offline: we are onlife. Developments in the field of big data, smart algorithms based on artificial intelligence are indispensable elements of the technologies discussed above. These developments, for example, play a role with IoT devices that send information to the cloud (big data) and are at the same time steered by data and algorithms from the cloud to perform a specific action in the physical world. Big data and algorithms help to make decisions in the public and private sectors, from detecting fraud or the likelihood of reoffending, to medical diagnoses. In some areas, smart algorithms and intelligent systems are already taking over decision-making from people, for example, with armed drones, or in smart cars. Technologies, embedded in advisory apps on our smartphone of in smart street lights, can be persuasive and may influence our behaviour and autonomy in subtle ways.
Due to digitization, there is now a lively trade in information. ‘Big data’ is sometimes referred to as ‘new gold’. Data is valuable because it enables better decisions, for example, about which consumers should be shown which ad or which people should be investigated as potential fraudsters. We have already discussed various issues regarding privacy, and big data presents a specific challenge in this respect due to the re-use and potential combinations of different data sources. Combining and reusing big data seems to be at odds with the principle of purpose limitation, which is one of the pillars of data protection legislation. Various authors argue that legislation and supervision in the big data era should focus more on companies’ responsibilities (accountability) and how data is used (Podesta et al.
2014; Cate et al.
2012). But opponents say that the principle of purpose limitation is an important mechanism to counteract unbridled collection and
data obesitas (Hildebrandt
2015).
In addition, a significant characteristic of big data is that it is not clear beforehand which insights can be captured from the data. Researchers showed that on the basis of Facebook ‘likes’, it was possible to identify someone’s sexual preference, religious and political orientation, personal characteristics and use of addictive substances (Kosinski et al.
2013). Authorities are also looking into big data’s potential. One example is the Dutch anti-fraud system called System Risk Indication (SyRI) which encrypts, combines and analyses data about fines, debts, benefits, education and integration in a secure digital environment in order to search more effectively for people abusing benefits or surcharges. SyRI has been criticised by both the Data Protection Authority and the Senate because of the impact on privacy.
Data mining techniques (
data analytics) and algorithms (combined with artificial intelligence, especially techniques such as
deep learning) benefit immensely from the large amounts of data that have become available in recent years. The data forms coaching files for self-learning software: the more data the software gets, the smarter it becomes. Companies like Facebook and Google have facial recognition software that is improving quickly thanks to the many photos that users upload every day. Translation software is also improving because it can draw on a large number of officially translated documents from the United Nations and the European Commission (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier
2013). In recent years, the discussions on monitoring the underlying algorithms in automated systems have come from different angles. The German Government recently released a position paper stating that online platforms—such as Google and Facebook—should provide more information about how their algorithms work, for example, when filtering news or search results.
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Public values
This study shows that the new wave of digitization is putting pressure on public values. ICT services and products are no longer gadgets: they are having a radical impact on our society. It is time to recognise the implications and to ensure that our public values and fundamental rights are safeguarded in the new digital era. The building blocks and the infrastructure for the new digital society are materializing now. The governance system to deal with the resulting social and ethical issues falls short in several dimensions, mainly because there is no clear understanding of the social and ethical issues implications of the digitization. Such an understanding is necessary so that these issues can be proactively addressed, that is, be anticipated, reflected upon, deliberated with the public and other stakeholders, and be responded to (Stahl et al.
2017; see also; Kizza
2013).
The supervision has been developed the most in the areas of privacy and data protection. For example, at European level, there has been an attempt to deal with big data issues by modifying the legislation. The new European Data Protection Regulation (EU 2016/679) building on the principles of the data protection directive (95/46/EC), adds a number of new obligations and responsibilities for data processors, and strengthens individual rights. This regulation shows that the topic of data is high on the agenda. However, there is also an ongoing debate about whether these legislative adjustments are adequate to deal with the inherent challenges of digitization. Particularly with regard to profiling, the legal framework only offers partial protection. For other ethical issues concerning digitization such as discrimination, autonomy, human dignity and unequal balance of power, the supervision is hardly organized. The most telling examples are the European Data Protection Supervisor initiatives (EDPS
2015,
2016), in particular to establish an ethics advisory group. Although social and ethical issues appear on the agenda, they are not being translated into policies that protect public values in practice. Supervisory bodies do not have enough insight in the emerging digitization issues. Likewise, civil society organizations and citizens are not sufficiently aware of the new digital developments, nor do they realise how they will be affected; the possibilities to defend themselves are too limited.
The need to focus on the effects of digitization is underlined by the fact that the central ethical themes relate to important values set down in international treaties and national constitutions. We can see issues such as privacy and justice reflected in the right to respect for private life, the right to equal treatment and the right to a fair trial. Human dignity and safety are mentioned in international treaties such as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (EU Charter) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Values such as autonomy, equal power relationships and control over technology are not explicitly named in the treaties but can be seen as part of or following from these fundamental and human rights. Digitization affects important public values.
The main task ahead of us is to effectively safeguard these widely acknowledged public values in our new digital society’s everyday practices. Unless government, industry, civil society and members of the public act now, there is a risk that while we are trying to get to grips with the new digital world, the frameworks to protect public values are meanwhile losing their relevance.