Designing technology in the age of digitalization: needs for technology assessment and ethics

Abstract

Technology research, design, and development is confronted with rapidly advancing digitalization in two respects: (1) digitally supported or enabled technologies need to be designed and developed, and (2) the respective R&D processes themselves will happen in a much more digitalized environment. Technology design generally must take into account the values involved and possible consequences of the development and use of the resulting products, services, and systems. In a digitalizing environment, the issue of values gains even more significance because more and more close and intimate interfaces between humans and technology have to be shaped. Designing human-machine interfaces is not only a functional issue but touches upon ethical questions such as the distribution of responsibility, but also upon anthropological issues related to the human self-image and ideas about future society as well. In the respective research, design, and development processes, value-laden issues such as control, privacy, empathy, responsibility, and accountability must be taken into account beyond technical issues of efficiency and reliability. The need for designing and shaping digital future technologies involving ethics and technology assessment will be demonstrated by three examples: future industrial production and the fields of self-driving cars and care robots. Value sensitive design and responsible research and innovation will be introduced as approaches to deal with these challenges.