Stories from 2045

I was lucky to be asked to contribute a couple of chapters to this great little book recently, edited by Calum Chace.

The stories explore the ways that artificial intelligence and related technologies will affect the job market.

At the moment, no-one can predict exactly what will happen, but it seems very likely that people will need to retrain and change jobs more often.

Looking further ahead, we may need to work out how to make technological unemployment a very positive outcome, and with that in mind, this book has twice as many positive stories as negative ones.

All proceeds from the book will go to the Economic Singularity Foundation, a charity established to promote constructive analysis and discussion of the future of work.

I hope you will enjoy the stories, but most of all, hope you will join the debate.

Join me on Twitter and share your opinion: @dataphilosopher

Whitepaper: Ethical by Design: Measuring and Managing Digital Ethics in the Enterprise

Since the Cambridge Analytica/ Facebook scandal the question of how to manage Ethics in the context of Digital technologies has risen in prominence from afterthought, to keynote agenda item. The problem is not simply that Ethics as a domain of governance is not well understood by the technology industry, but that it is either restricted in mainstream dialogue to a discussion of risk and safety issues, or it is conflated with regulatory compliance. The terms used to for structures to manage ethics, such as ‘Ethics Boards’ and ‘Ethics Councils’ are also used interchangeably. What this paper proposes is to define Digital Ethics in terms where it becomes clear that it is necessarily a separate topic of governance to regulatory compliance and technical risk/ safety management. This paper also suggests some defining characteristics of Ethics Boards and Councils and proposes alternative models. Finally, a case is made for how the quality of ethics governance can be measured and therefore managed, in order to build comparisons between organisations in language that will be familiar to investors and consumers. It is believed that in doing so, the difficulty of talking of this subject in purely subjective terms can be avoided.