Mapping Ethical Artificial Intelligence Policy Landscape: A Mixed Method Analysis
This study critically examines 57 policy documents pertaining to ethical AI originating from 24 distinct countries, employing a combination of computational text mining methods and qualitative content analysis. The primary objective is to methodically identify common themes throughout these policy documents and perform a comparative analysis of the ways in which various governments give priority to crucial matters. A total of nineteen topics were initially retrieved. Through an iterative coding process, six overarching themes were identified: principles, the protection of personal data, governmental roles and responsibilit...
Source: Science and Engineering Ethics - March 7, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Analyzing the Role of Values and Ideals in the Development of Energy Systems: How Values, Their Idealizations, and Technologies Shape Political Decision-Making
This study examines an important aspect of energy history and policy: the intertwinement of energy technologies with ideals. Ideals play an important role in energy visions and innovation pathways. Aspirations to realize technical, social, and political ideals indicate a long-term commitment in the design of energy systems, distinguishable from commitment to other abstract goals, such as values. This study offers an analytical scheme that could help to conceptualize these differences and their impact on energy policy. In the proposed model, two spheres of interaction are highlighted: a material sphere in which values and t...
Source: Science and Engineering Ethics - February 29, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

What Do We Teach to Engineering Students: Embedded Ethics, Morality, and Politics
AbstractIn the past few years, calls for integrating ethics modules in engineering curricula have multiplied. Despite this positive trend, a number of issues with these ‘embedded’ programs remains. First, learning goals are underspecified. A second limitation is the conflation of different dimensions under the same banner, in particular confusion between ethics curricula geared towards addressing the ethics of individual conduct and curricula geared towards add ressing ethics at the societal level. In this article, we propose a tripartite framework to overcome these difficulties. Our framework analytically decomposes a...
Source: Science and Engineering Ethics - February 19, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

How Competition for Funding Impacts Scientific Practice: Building Pre-fab Houses but no Cathedrals
AbstractIn the research integrity literature, funding plays two different roles: it is thought to elevate questionable research practices (QRPs) due to perverse incentives, and it is a potential actor to incentivize research integrity standards. Recent studies, asking funders, have emphasized the importance of the latter. However, the perspective of active researchers on the impact of competitive research funding on science has not been explored yet. Here, I address this issue by conducting a series of group sessions with researchers in two different countries with different degrees of competition for funding, from three s...
Source: Science and Engineering Ethics - February 13, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Measures of Ethics and Social Responsibility Among Undergraduate Engineering Students: Findings from a Longitudinal Study
AbstractPrior research on engineering students ’ understandings of ethics and social responsibility has produced mixed and sometimes conflicting results. Seeking greater clarity in this area of investigation, we conducted an exploratory, longitudinal study at four universities in the United States to better understand how engineering undergrad uate students perceive ethics and social responsibility and how those perceptions change over time. Undergraduate engineering students at four U.S. universities were surveyed three times: during their 1st (Fall 2015), 5th (Fall 2017), and 8th semesters (Spring 2019). The students w...
Source: Science and Engineering Ethics - February 12, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Ambiguity in Ethical Standards: Global Versus Local Science in Explaining Academic Plagiarism
AbstractThe past decade has seen extensive research carried out on the systematic causes of research misconduct. Simultaneously, less attention has been paid to the variation in academic misconduct between research fields, as most empirical studies focus on one particular discipline. We propose that academic discipline is one of several systematic factors that might contribute to academic misbehavior. Drawing on a neo-institutional approach, we argue that in the developing countries, the norm of textual originality has not drawn equal support across different research fields depending on its level of internationalization. ...
Source: Science and Engineering Ethics - February 12, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The Donation of Human Biological Material for Brain Organoid Research: The Problems of Consciousness and Consent
AbstractHuman brain organoids are three-dimensional masses of tissues derived from human stem cells that partially recapitulate the characteristics of the human brain. They have promising applications in many fields, from basic research to applied medicine. However, ethical concerns have been raised regarding the use of human brain organoids. These concerns primarily relate to the possibility that brain organoids may become conscious in the future. This possibility is associated with uncertainties about whether and in what sense brain organoids could have consciousness and what the moral significance of that would be. Thes...
Source: Science and Engineering Ethics - February 5, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Healthy and Happy? An Ethical Investigation of Emotion Recognition and Regulation Technologies (ERR) within Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)
AbstractAmbient Assisted Living (AAL) refers to technologies that track daily activities of persons in need of care to enhance their autonomy and minimise their need for assistance. New technological developments show an increasing effort to integrate automated emotion recognition and regulation (ERR) into AAL systems. These technologies aim to recognise emotions via different sensors and, eventually, to regulate emotions defined as “negative” via different forms of intervention. Although these technologies are already implemented in other areas, AAL stands out by its tendency to enable an inconspicuous 24-hour surveil...
Source: Science and Engineering Ethics - January 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Potential Issues in Mandating a Disclosure of Institutional Investigation in Retraction Notices
AbstractA retraction notice is a formal announcement for the removal of a paper from the literature, which is a weighty matter. Xu et al. (Science and Engineering Ethics, 29(4), 25 2023) reported that 73.7% of retraction notices indexed by the Web of Science (1927 –2019) provided no information about institutional investigations that may have led to the retractions, and recommended that Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) retraction guidelines should make itmandatory to disclose institutional investigations leading to retractions in such notices. While this recommendation would add to the transparency of the retractio...
Source: Science and Engineering Ethics - January 23, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Scientists ’ Views on the Ethics, Promises and Practices of Synthetic Biology: A Qualitative Study of Australian Scientific Practice
AbstractSynthetic biology is a broad term covering multiple scientific methodologies, technologies, and practices. Pairing biology with engineering, synbio seeks to design and build biological systems, either through improving living cells by adding in new functions, or creating new structures by combining natural and synthetic components. As with all new technologies, synthetic biology raises a number of ethical considerations. In order to understand what these issues might be, and how they relate to those covered in ethics literature on synbio, we conducted an interview study with practicing synthetic biologists affiliat...
Source: Science and Engineering Ethics - December 11, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Pedagogical Orientations and Evolving Responsibilities of Technological Universities: A Literature Review  of the History of Engineering Education
AbstractCurrent societal changes and challenges demand a broader role of technological universities, thus opening the question of how their role evolved over time and how to frame their current responsibility. In response to urgent calls for debating and redefining the identity of contemporary technological universities, this paper has two aims. The first aim is to identify the key characteristics and orientations marking the development of technological universities, as recorded in the history of engineering education. The second aim is to articulate the responsibility of contemporary technological universities given thei...
Source: Science and Engineering Ethics - December 5, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research