A new IES Technical Committee on Technology Ethics and Society
IES established in June 2020 a new Technical Committee on Technology Ethics and Society (TES). The technical committee aims to provide a forum for academia and industry to exchange information, ideas, research directions, roadmaps, impacts, and lessons learned in the cross-disciplinary area pertaining to technology ethics and societal aspects.
The rapid advances in a number of areas including industrial technologies, Artificial Intelligence (AI), autonomous systems etc., have led to a new generation of increasingly sophisticated and autonomous systems that are increasingly fueled by AI. Such systems are utilized not only within controlled industrial environments but also in consumer applications, and interact with people and systems on a daily basis. Their prevalence in tangible (e.g., self-driving cars, intelligent robots) or intangible form (e.g., AI decision and profiling algorithms) impact society at multiple levels and have an ethical dimension.
The newly created IES TC TES is motivated by these rapid advances and aims to address the intersection of key interdisciplinary areas. Some indicative areas targeted by this new TC include Machine Ethics, Implications of Industrial Technologies, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Ethical Decision Making, AI Explainability and Transparency, Autonomous Systems in Society, Engineering of Ethical Systems, Ethically driven Robotics and Automation Systems, Rational Decision Making and Ethics, etc.