Publication
What Kind of Civilization Are We Building?
A founding reflection from Alessandro Dotti on why Ethical Infrastructure exists — and the question that opened the first public conversation around it.
Research & Insights
Research & Insights
Ideas should be explored before they become assumptions. Ethical Infrastructure will progressively publish original reflections, essays, interviews, commentaries and collaborative research examining the relationship between technology, ethics, infrastructure and human development — not to produce content for its own sake, but to create a space for thoughtful, independent and constructive reflection on the questions that will shape our common future.
15 publications
Policy Paper
Auditing automated eligibility decisions: what a working audit actually requires
Most audit obligations in current legislation can be satisfied without anyone examining whether a system produces defensible decisions. This paper sets out…
Foundational Reflection
What is infrastructure for?
A reflection on the question beneath our practical work. Infrastructure is usually justified by what it enables. We think it is better…
Article
What clinical governance already knows about deploying AI
Medicine spent a century building the institutional machinery for deploying interventions that can harm people. Much of it transfers directly, and is…
Commentary
Consent is carrying more weight than it can bear
Individual agreement was designed to authorise a specific use of specific information. It is now the legal basis for inferences nobody could…
Report
The material cost of computation: a review of current accounting practice
Digital infrastructure has a physical footprint in energy, water, land and minerals. This report reviews how that footprint is currently reported, and…
Foundational Reflection
On owing something to people who cannot object
Every account of obligation we have runs through consent, participation or reciprocity. None of them reaches the people most affected by infrastructure…
Article
Procurement is where ethics is actually decided
Ethical review usually arrives after the contract is signed, the integration is built and the alternative has been discarded. By then it…
Publication
Working paper: reversibility as a design criterion for public infrastructure
Efficiency and reversibility trade against each other, and public infrastructure decisions almost always resolve the trade in favour of efficiency without recording…
Interview
“The regulator that cannot hire cannot regulate” — a conversation on institutional capacity
A conversation with a former supervisory official on what actually limits enforcement: not the absence of powers, but the absence of anyone…
Article
Ethics teaching arrives too late in technical education
A final-year ethics module teaches students that ethics is what you consider after the engineering is finished. That lesson is learned more…
Policy Paper
Submission: consultation on automated decision-making in public administration
Our full response to a public consultation, published as submitted. We supported three proposals, opposed one, and identified an omission we consider…