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.
14 publicationsMost audit obligations in current legislation can be satisfied without anyone examining whether a system produces defensible decisions. This paper sets out what an audit would have to include to be worth requiring.
A reflection on the question beneath our practical work. Infrastructure is usually justified by what it enables. We think it is better…
Medicine spent a century building the institutional machinery for deploying interventions that can harm people. Much of it transfers directly, and is…
Individual agreement was designed to authorise a specific use of specific information. It is now the legal basis for inferences nobody could…
Digital infrastructure has a physical footprint in energy, water, land and minerals. This report reviews how that footprint is currently reported, and…
Every account of obligation we have runs through consent, participation or reciprocity. None of them reaches the people most affected by infrastructure…
Ethical review usually arrives after the contract is signed, the integration is built and the alternative has been discarded. By then it…
Efficiency and reversibility trade against each other, and public infrastructure decisions almost always resolve the trade in favour of efficiency without recording…
A conversation with a former supervisory official on what actually limits enforcement: not the absence of powers, but the absence of anyone…
A final-year ethics module teaches students that ethics is what you consider after the engineering is finished. That lesson is learned more…
Our full response to a public consultation, published as submitted. We supported three proposals, opposed one, and identified an omission we consider…
Security review is routine, expected and resourced. Ethical review is none of these. The difference is not technical, and the history of…
