{"id":22607,"date":"2017-05-26T13:31:11","date_gmt":"2017-05-26T17:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=22607"},"modified":"2017-05-27T05:11:26","modified_gmt":"2017-05-27T09:11:26","slug":"imagining-ethics-workshopping-the-future-everyday-of-autonomous-driving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2017\/05\/26\/imagining-ethics-workshopping-the-future-everyday-of-autonomous-driving\/","title":{"rendered":"“Imagining Ethics”: Workshopping The Future Everyday Of Autonomous Driving"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Screen grab, Ghost in the Shell. Mamoru Oshii, 1995.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In April this year, thanks to Stephanie Dinkins<\/a> and Francis Tsen<\/a>g, artists-in-residence at New Inc.<\/a>, I experimented with a workshop called ‘Imagining Ethics’. The workshop invites participants to imagine and work through everyday scenarios in a near future with autonomous vehicles and driving. These scenarios are usually related to moral conflicts, or interpersonal, social, and cultural challenges. This post is about situating this experiment within the methods and approaches of\u00a0 design fiction, a technique to speculate about near futures.<\/p>\n

Julian Bleecker writes about design fiction<\/a> as \u201ctotems\u201d through which projections into the future may be assembled:<\/p>\n

“Design fictions are assemblages of various sorts, part story, part material, part idea-articulating prop, part functional software. …are component parts for different kinds of near future worlds. They are like artifacts brought back from those worlds in order to be examined, studied over. They are puzzles of a sort….They are complete specimens, but foreign in the sense that they represent a corner of some speculative world where things are different from how we might imagine the \u201cfuture\u201d to be, or how we imagine some other corner of the future to be. These worlds are \u201cworlds\u201d not because they contain everything, but because they contain enough to encourage our imaginations, which, as it turns out, are much better at pulling out the questions, activities, logics, culture, interactions and practices of the imaginary worlds in which such a designed object might exist.”<\/p>\n

I’m interested in what speculation about near futures means for discussions of ethics in the context of ubiquitous computing and artificial intelligence. Are we creating ethics for now, or for the future, and if for the future, then how do we envisage future scenarios that requires ethical decision-making?<\/p>\n

Ethics are frameworks for values, some of which are codified in the law; some, related to AI-based technologies, currently challenge the law. Autonomous driving worries the law: the narrative around autonomous vehicles has tended to focus on the opportunities and limitations of software to make ‘ethical’ decisions. Simply put, how can driverless car software be held responsible for making decisions that may result in the loss of human life?\u00a0 I’ve argued that<\/a> this approach places software and its creation as central to the construction of ethics, rather than the wider social, political, cultural, and economic conditions in which autonomous driving (is) will be situated. Is it possible that the ethical implications of autonomous driving will involve more than just the philosophical conundrums defined by the Trolley Problem<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Drawing on Mike Ananny’s definition of technology ethics as “a mix of institutionalized codes, professional cultures, technological capabilities, social practices, and individual decision making”, I claim that ethics is contexually and situationally produced. Imagining Ethics<\/em> takes the form of a workshop to identify and discuss these contexts and situations.<\/p>\n

So, at New Inc, a group of people sat down for a little over two hours to work through scenarios projected to occur five years from the present moment. Here are the scenarios:<\/p>\n