Safe by Design Regulation for Academic Experimentation and Value Conflicts: An Exploration of Solution Directions.

In this paper, we explore solution directions for the implementation of Safe by Design (SbD) in safety regimes for academic experimentation. SbD is a dynamic and anticipatory strategy for safety regulation in academic research. In this strategy, safety is taken in a broader sense including not only issues of technical precaution of avoiding risks of experimentation but also the societal responsibility of researchers and research institutes of identifying possible future risks. In our research, we have interviewed academic researchers from different disciplines and university support personnel about the factors that enable and limit the possibilities of researchers to implement SbD in safety regimes for experimentation. We articulate our findings in terms of a core set of research values and in terms of conflicts between safety and these research values. And we argue that tools for resolving value conflicts as originating in design for values research can provide directions to solve the value conflicts, and thus help academic researchers to adopt SbD in their experimentation.

Driving in the Dark: Designing Autonomous Vehicles for Reducing Light Pollution.

This paper proposes that autonomous vehicles should be designed to reduce light pollution. In support of this specific proposal, a moral assessment of autonomous vehicles more comprehensive than the dilemmatic life-and-death questions of trolley problem-style situations is presented. The paper therefore consists of two interrelated arguments. The first is that autonomous vehicles are currently still a technology in development, and not one that has acquired its definitive shape, meaning the design of both the vehicles and the surrounding infrastructure is open-ended. Design for values is utilized to articulate a path forward, by which engineering ethics should strive to incorporate values into a technology during its development phase. Second, it is argued that nighttime lighting-a critical supporting infrastructure-should be a prima facie consideration for autonomous vehicles during their development phase. It is shown that a reduction in light pollution, and more boldly a better balance of lighting and darkness, can be achieved via the design of future autonomous vehicles. Two case studies are examined (parking lots and highways) through which autonomous vehicles may be designed for "driving in the dark." Nighttime lighting issues are thus inserted into a broader ethics of autonomous vehicles, while simultaneously introducing questions of autonomous vehicles into debates about light pollution.

A functional abc for biotechnology and the dissemination of its progeny.

In this paper we present a functional analysis of biotechnology and identify the particular status that genetic engineering has relative to other biotechnological techniques such as domestication. The analysis builds on work by Dan Sperber and characterises biotechnology in primarily technical and biological functional terms as symbiotic interactions in which humans modify other organisms. We identify three main routes by which these interactions are established in biotechnology. We argue that two of these routes have in-built mechanisms for preventing an uncontrolled dissemination of the modified organisms, and that one has an in-built mechanism for promoting such dissemination. The three routes are available to traditional forms of biotechnology as to state-of-the-art genetic engineering. Drawing now on work by Alfred Nordmann on the uncanniness of modern technologies, we show that genetic engineering is set apart by the epistemic consequences of the microscopic size of its progeny: genetically modified organisms, when disseminating, do so beyond our perceptual and conceptual control. Existing strategies against unwanted dissemination of organisms modified in traditional biotechnology are therefore typically not adequate against possible unwanted dissemination of genetically modified organisms, giving this dissemination a status similar to that of untraceable natural disasters.

Nano-technology and privacy: on continuous surveillance outside the panopticon.

We argue that nano-technology in the form of invisible tags, sensors, and Radio Frequency Identity Chips (RFIDs) will give rise to privacy issues that are in two ways different from the traditional privacy issues of the last decades. One, they will not exclusively revolve around the idea of centralization of surveillance and concentration of power, as the metaphor of the Panopticon suggests, but will be about constant observation at decentralized levels. Two, privacy concerns may not exclusively be about constraining information flows but also about designing of materials and nano-artifacts such as chips and tags. We begin by presenting a framework for structuring the current debates on privacy, and then present our arguments.