The 2021 Yearbook of the Digital Ethics Lab

Abstract

This book explores a wide range of topics in digital ethics and governance. It features 17 chapters that analyse the opportunities and the ethical challenges posed by digital innovation, delineate new approaches to solve them, and offer concrete guidance on how to govern emerging technologies. The contributors are all members of the Digital Ethics Lab (the DELab) at the Oxford Internet Institute, a research environment that draws on a wide range of academic traditions. Collectively, the chapters of this book illustrate how the field of digital ethics - whether understood as an academic discipline or an area of practice - is undergoing a process of maturation. This process has both been propelled and reflected by two long-term trends. First, and most importantly, the focus of the discourse concerning how to design and use digital technologies is increasingly shifting from ‘soft ethics’ to ‘hard governance’. The second trend is an ongoing shift from ‘what’ to ‘how’, whereby abstract or ad-hoc approaches to AI governance are giving way to more concrete and systematic solutions. While these trends are neither new nor surprising, the maturation of the field of digital ethics has, as this book attempts to show, been both accelerated and illustrated by a series of recent events. This book thereby takes an important step towards defining and implementing feasible and effective approaches to digital governance.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, digital ethics, emerging technologies, governance, philosophy of information