The Ethics Canvas was developed by ADAPT Centre researchers to encourage educators, entrepreneurs, engineers and designers to engage with ethics in their research and innovation projects. Research and innovation foster great benefits for society, but also raise important ethical concerns.

This (ever in progress) reader was put together by Femke Snelting, Helen Pritchard and Sofia Boschat Thorez in October 2024 at the occasion of the Complicit Chips worksession.

The Digital Ethics Compass is a toolkit that helps companies make the right decisions from a design ethical standpoint. It’s a simple and practical tool and learning program (a series of workshops) that enables companies to build an ethical foundation for their future financial growth.

The National AI Strategy sets out how Ireland can be an international leader in using AI to benefit our economy and society, through a people-centred, ethical approach to its development, adoption and use.

This guide presents the results of a year-long study into alternative ways of creating images of AI, involving roundtable and workshop conversations with over 100 experts from fields including the tech sector, media, education, research, policy and the arts. Its aim is to advise people who work with images of AI – from journalists to communications officers, from educators to activists – on sourcing and creating the best images for communicating accurately and compellingly.

The rise of the robots has been greatly exaggerated. Whose interests does that serve?

The development of cyborg in art through depiction, exploration and embodiment

The book discusses the potential threat to liberal democracy that use of new and emerging biotechnologies for transhumanist ends poses.

In an age of meme driven speculation, NFT’s, and democratized options trading, such a statement might seem common sense. Even natural. Does anyone, after all, really think a crypto currency named as a joke for a small dog, or an almost bankrupt mall-based game retailer is intrinsically worth anything, much less billions of dollars?

The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice has published a pre-legislative scrutiny report on proposed amendments to enable An Garda Síochána’s use of facial recognition technology (FRT). The report identifies significant deficiencies, including a lack of clarity on how FRT would be implemented, its accuracy, potential biases, and compliance with EU data protection laws. Stakeholders, including advocacy groups, legal experts, and the Data Protection Commission, raised concerns about indiscriminate surveillance, rights violations, and inadequate safeguards. The committee emphasizes the need for a clear rationale, detailed guidelines, and robust oversight to address human rights and data privacy risks before advancing the legislation.

A guide on how to protect your privacy.

It is a prosaic truth that none of the weapon systems which today threaten murder on a genocidal scale, and whose design, manufacture and sale condemns countless people, especially children, to poverty and starvation, that none of these devices could be developed without the earnest, even enthusiastic, cooperation of computer professionals. It cannot go on without us! Without us the arms race, especially the qualitative arms race, could not advance another step. Does this plain, simple and obvious fact say anything to us as computer professionals? I
think so.

We have now entered the era of trillion parameter machine learning models trained on billion-sized datasets scraped from the internet. The rise of these gargantuan datasets has given rise to formidable bodies of critical work that has called for caution while generating these large datasets. These address concerns surrounding the dubious curation practices used to generate these datasets, the sordid quality of alt-text data available on the world wide web, the problematic content of the CommonCrawl dataset often used as a source for training large language models, and the entrenched biases in large-scale visio-linguistic models (such as OpenAI’s CLIP model) trained on opaque datasets (WebImageText).

Image source: Birhane, A., Prabhu, V.U., & Kahembwe, E. (2021). Multimodal datasets: misogyny, pornography, and malignant stereotypes. ArXiv, abs/2110.01963.

This article contrasts two reform proposals articulated in recent debates about how to democratize the digital economy: data-owning democracy and digital socialism. A data-owning democracy is a political-economic regime characterized by the widespread distribution of data as capital among citizens, whereas digital socialism entails the social ownership of productive assets in the digital economy and popular control over digital services. The article argues that while a degree of complementarity exists between the two, there are important limitations to theories of data-owning democracy that have not yet received significant attention within the literature.

At the Ethics Studio, ‘Personal Computer’ presents a quiet scene: a computer sits on a desk in a home office, its owner now absent. What happens to the information stored within?

This installation invites visitors to reflect on questions of digital legacy, privacy and what happens to our personal data when we’re no longer around.

“The Bigger Picture” is an Art-Science collaboration that addresses public perception and misconceptions surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) through a series of participatory workshops, analysis, artist commissions and exhibitions that will take place during Ireland’s Science Week 2024.

Through fresh perspectives and thought-provoking visuals, The Bigger Picture seeks to transform how we perceive and understand Artificial Intelligence — not as a distant, futuristic concept, but as an integral part of the world we live in today.

Enter a world where your face becomes data. This interactive art installation offers a striking visualisation of how facial recognition systems operate. As you step into the Ethics Studio, an image of your face will be captured in real-time.

Though no data is collected, this experience invites you to explore the fine line between innovation, surveillance and personal privacy, prompting reflection on the role of technology and identity in the digital age.

Image: Comuzi / © BBC / Better Images of AI / Mirror D / CC-BY 4.0

Explore AI firsthand through an animatronic face that comes to life with expressive eye and jaw movements.

Powered by a Raspberry Pi and the advanced GPT system, this AI is ready to answer your questions and showcase the power of speech synthesis, speech recognition, face tracking, and generative AI.

Watch AI evolve before your eyes as new technologies are added over time. Come and be part of the future, where AI is accessible to all!