Pages: 21

In recent years, there has been heightened sensibility to ethical issues connected with artificial intelligence. Conceptions of different types of AI have emerged which touch upon this new sensibility, including wholesome augmented intelligence, responsible/trustworthy/ethical AI, AI for good and human-centered AI. In this chapter, we focus on the concept of human-centered AI, which has gained more prominence lately and has even appeared in the names of organizations. However, there are major problems with the conceptualization and operationalization of human-centered AI. This chapter critically analyzes academic visions about human-centered AI in five Western university institutions’ online textual content (n = 573). The study scrutinizes institutions that use the term “human-centered” in their names. Even though institutions provide more content framed with supportive attitudes rather than focusing on technical solutions, the related texts fail to address several important issues. First, they often treat humanity as a homogenous group, suggesting that every society struggles with the same problems. Second, human-centered AI is treated as being mainly aligned with the Global North’s needs. Finally, most of the texts associated with the scrutinized institutions lack discussion of the surging inequalities connected to the capitalist system. Therefore, they do not offer many AI-supported solutions that might address the challenges of a lack of clean water, poverty, or the presence of dangerous jobs that harm the Global South. Instead, the analyzed institutions primarily present societal challenges within national borders, while they disregard the need for redressing fundamental problems that hinder the creation of acceptable living conditions in poor regions. Building on the sociology of expectations, this study argues that the visions of human-centered AI are of paramount importance. These expectations have the potential to legitimize, guide and coordinate the activities of different actors responsible for the research, development and application of AI-driven technologies.

Pages: 17

Artificial intelligence and the emergence of the “Internet of Things” are changing working life. Intelligent technologies are expected to transform the logic of entire industries, rendering work after the fourth industrial revolution precarious for the many and prosperous for the few. Scholars have declared the terminal decline of routine work and the rise of creative work. Such changes in working life have considerable cultural and organizational consequences. They can exacerbate distress among workers and heighten tensions for the HRM profession, impacting well-being as well as operational change in organizations and society. This role necessarily involves ethical questions when weighing profitability against obligations for corporate social responsibility.

Pages: 16

Decentralized finance (DeFi) shares with blockchain technologies a refutation of interpersonal trust and norm-obedient behavior, suggesting technical solutions to problems of financial coordination that substitute for that lack. Through this, DeFi equips the technology with the capacity to induce norm-obedient behavior. The chapter discusses the ethical implications of this strategy against the background of an understanding of ethics, borrowed from Michel Foucault, as differing from moral code and norm-obedient behavior. From that perspective, ethics is first and foremost a reflection on moral self-conduct at the forefront of (moral or technical) code. In the case of Defi, ethical behavior is problematized and debated that concerns itself with the subjective qualities that must be cultivated in order to participate in DeFi in the first place, to engage in it with one’s resources and to accept its incentive structures, rules and regulations.

Pages: 17

This chapter explores audio beacon technology with the aim of elucidating the implications of this technology for the individual in contemporary society. The hidden surveillance of this technology is examined through privacy literature and through the humanistic perspective of George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four. The general conclusion formed is that audio beacon technologies can serve as a surveillance method, enhancing authoritarian and exploitative regimes. To mitigate the negative impacts of audio beacons, this research proposes two types of solutions—(1) individual actions that will have an immediate effect and (2) government legislation that can improve privacy in the longer term. Both of these solutions cannot happen without a raised public awareness, toward which this research hopes to make a contribution.