The Ethics of Digital Transformations and Artificial Intelligence Technology

Thinking about the ethics of systemic financial risk during my postdoc in Zurich, I got interested in assessing the ethics of new technologies more generally. Specifically, my aim is to better understand the effects of the ongoing digital transformation and AI-related changes to society and individual rights. In one a series of articles, I explored the trust/technology nexus by asking what concept of trust we need to meaningfully assess non-human agents, including AI-technology. In other work, I have started to extend my work on solidarity to this issue: what are the normative implications of such phenomena as ‘datafication’, ‘technology induced social fragmentation’ for democratic communities? Are there fundamental rights to access new general-purpose technologies like AI? What institutions should transnationally regulate novel technologies? My aspiration in this area of research is to make, over time, a major contribution to the field of ‘political theory of AI governance’, a nascent sub-discipline that sees AI-induced change as giving rise to genuinely political questions rather than merely topics in applied ethics.