What does ethics have to do with technology?
What is driving this growing focus on technology ethics?
What is the reasoning behind it?
The basic rationale is really quite simple. Technology increasingly shapes how human beings seek the ‘good life’ and with what degree of success. Well-designed and well-used technologies can make it easier for people to live well. Poorly designed or misused technologies can make it harder to live well.
Technologies are not ethically ‘neutral’, for they reflect the values that we ‘bake in’ to them with our design choices as well as the values which guide our distribution and use of them. Technology both reveal and shape what humans value, what we think is ‘good’ in life and worth seeking.
So what is new then? Why is ethics now such an important topic in technical contexts, now, more then ever?
The answer has partly to do with the unprecedented speeds and scales at which technical advances are transforming the social fabric of our lives and the inability of regulators and lawmakers to keep up with these changes. In this session, we will uncover more answers to the above question.
What does ethics have to do with cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity practices have as their aim the securing – that is, the ‘keeping safe’ – of date, computer systems and networks. In protecting institutions, businesses, etc cybersecurity professionals in turn are protecting the lives and happiness of the human beings who depend upon them.