As the value of ICTs in all areas of global community and economy grows, issues of ethics, privacy and trust are increasingly becoming barriers to achieving global benefit, particularly for underserved countries and communities. As individuals and businesses become more dependent on digital platforms to communicate, collaborate and transact, the trust we put into modern and developing technologies is one of the most important drivers of our future economic growth, shared prosperity and societal progress. Modern platforms power innovation and gains in productivity with profound impacts on people's lives, and ICTs continue to play a critical role in accelerating achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
Therefore, trust will be a key element for a sustainable and evolving digital economy, especially in an increasingly inter-connected world, and it is a key asset in an ever more complex digital world. Equity of access to data and resources is core to social and economic progress. But how do we ensure the benefits of ICTs when trust boundaries are changing, contributing to a new dynamic global environment that may inspire insecurity, fear and suspicion therefore creating consequences for how ICTs and data generated can be leveraged for delivering a better future for world citizens?
This Thematic Workshop will be set in the context of IEEE’s Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems—an Initiative that addresses 13 dimensions of ethical and human rights issues, including those related to economics, society, personal data and individual access, law and policy, and that has working groups in Brazil, Europe, China, Japan, Korea, Mexico, The Russian Federation and North America. From the Initiative’s Ethically Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, Version II, speakers will provide perspectives on the issues of the new trust dynamic from a set of principles rooted in responsibility, transparency and human centricity.
The speakers will discuss the criticality of building a new, human-centric narrative of purpose around and for technology and science, as well as the importance of reclaiming our digital identity in the algorithmic age and developing metrics that capture the well-being of people, not as an “externality” of global production chains and markets. Through an interactive and dynamic dialogue with participants, speakers will explore how society must encourage people, businesses and communities involved in technology development and deployment to collectively and individually assume their part of anticipative responsibility and how we can take care to proactively ensure that the systems are designed in such a way that their outcomes are as much as possible truly beneficial for humanity, while mitigating predictable risks already at the inception and design phase, and not as an afterthought.