California Dreaming – CEPE 2007

Published by David Horner | Filed under Announcements, Research

Greetings from the plush surroundings of the University of San Diego and the joys of the 7th International conference on Computer Ethics/Philosophical enquiry (CEPE 2007). By the way, the University of San Diego is just one of the three universities in the city, this one being the richly-funded private (Catholic) organisation, the other two being state vehicles.

Key themes of the conference have so far included the importance of developing ethical frameworks to deal with artificial intelligence and autonomous agents; and the idea of shifting computer ethics from a preoccupation with ‘right and wrong actions’ towards thinking about the ‘good’. So, instead of just focusing on prohibitions (eg. telling our students not to plagiarise), thinking about our positive aspirations and expectations for them and our role towards them. What is a good community after all?

An important talking point at the conference is the delightful Luciano Floridi’s theory of an ethics of the infosphere and its bi-product, an ontological theory of privacy. I have claimed that my own work is a Floridi-free zone, dealing as it does with the ethics of forecasting and about the future of which we can have no information (abstract: Digital Futures: Promising ethics and the ethics of promising).

In the present context, Paul De Latt’s paper “Blogging about one’s own life: trusting trust and empowering exhibitionism” (abstract) seems particularly significant. He says authentic exhibitionism is a counter-movement against the surveillance society. Is it so? What do we think? Answers on a postcard please.